I installed Android Studio via homebrew “brew cask install android-studio” as a part of my automated Mac OS setup. Recently, Android Studio prompted me that an update is available. When I accepted to update, it failed with an error “Studio does not have write access to /private/var/folders/wt/rjv6_wcn4f97_2nth7fqftqh0000gn/T/AppTranslocation/19A80F28-865B-41FC-AA87-B8E43C826FCB/d/Android Studio.app/Contents. Please run it by a privileged user to update.” This error was confusing; I was running Android Studio as myself, a nonprivileged user and the same user owned this directory. Googling it a bit for AppTranslocation took me here.

From this point onward, the issue and the fix were relatively straightforward. Apple marked Android Studio as quarantine and hence was in a read-only directory. Quarantine status was confirmed by

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$ xattr -l /Applications/Android\ Studio.app/
com.apple.quarantine: Chrome;9B843802-B7C1-4F48-BC68-09D8F81E6784

The fix was relatively simple as well

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$ xattr -d -r -s com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Android\ Studio.app/
...

Update worked as expected after this.

Setting HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS=--no-quarantine seems to enable this behavior for all the future installs.