Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

notes.alinpanaitiu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 208 posts

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#81

Post by klodolph »

bitwize wrote: post #61
mdmglr wrote: post #2

I recently had to uninstall some apps and it’s common for apps to litter files throughout /Library and ~/Library. The UX from early MacOS days is you can drag/drop the App to the Trash Can to uninstall it. Does MacOS actually clean up the misc. files applications leave at some point?

Wait wat So macOS is as shitty as Windows in terms of app install? Anyway, accepted wisdom now is that applications should only run containerized, which would make uninstall as simple as deleting the container.

It’s really not.

The stuff in ~/Library is caches + preferences + any other data. Deleting an app on macOS, even back in the day, did not delete the preferences.

The problems with Windows is that you needed an installer in the first place, and then an uninstaller, and then you couldn’t move an application to a different location. On a Mac, you can still just drag the application to the /Applications folder, or somewhere else, and then delete it later. The user data remains.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#82

Post by klodolph »

cush wrote: post #37
tacker2000 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just unbelievable. The billion $$ company cant just automate the uninstall procedure for their users? How hard would it be to auto delete the contents of ~/Library? Or have some periodic auto clean? one can always dream, no? I wonder how many users that have uninstalled VMware still have 30 gigs of unused VMs lying around on their disk.

It’s a tradeoff between an incredibly user-friendly install experience for non App Store apps, vs a clean uninstall experience. The OS doesn’t know what files that app created, thus can’t clean them up.

The OS also doesn’t know when you uninstall an app whether the app is really gone. You could have copied it to a network drive first, or maybe you have a different version of the app in a folder somewhere. Who knows?

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#83

Post by someNameIG »

MissTake wrote: post #4
mdmglr wrote: post #2

I recently had to uninstall some apps and it’s common for apps to litter files throughout /Library and ~/Library. The UX from early MacOS days is you can drag/drop the App to the Trash Can to uninstall it. Does MacOS actually clean up the misc. files applications leave at some point?

Nope, still leaves them behind. I’ve been using AppCleaner ( https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ ) for years now and it’s a real neat (and free) app that’ll do a pretty decent job of cleaning up crud.

What I normally do is use finder to search for system files and delete them also along with the .app . You have to add system files to the search manually though.

When you search there is a + next to save in finder, click that, have name and matcha, + another option, choose other and scroll down to System Files, then set to are included.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#84

Post by AbusiveHNAdmin »

mdmglr wrote: post #2

I recently had to uninstall some apps and it’s common for apps to litter files throughout /Library and ~/Library. The UX from early MacOS days is you can drag/drop the App to the Trash Can to uninstall it. Does MacOS actually clean up the misc. files applications leave at some point?

[flagged]

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#85

Post by riolu »

throwaway290 wrote: post #79
nerdponx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that sometimes people do actually want to clean up all artifacts of an installation, and don't want to go digging around in a bunch of machine-generated directories trying to guess what to delete. I think I agree that the default behavior should be to leave all that data on the user's system. But I also think that apps should have some kind of associated file manifest, which you can use to automatically clea…

> sometimes people do actually want to clean up There are two scenarios I want the cleanup to happen: 1) app is buggy and I'm trying to fix it by reinstalling from scratch, 2) I need to free disk space. Both are pretty rare, and in the second case I am already using a specialized utility like DaisyDisk to see where my space has gone. > transient data files /tmp? That gets actually auto cleaned up! > settings Maybe. D…

> 1) app is buggy and I'm trying to fix it by reinstalling from scratch

You don't specify and it's highly dependent but in most cases when an app is misbehaving it's an issue with preferences. You can reset most apps with `defaults` without blowing away all its data. There are some intricacies with how macOS handles preferences, so you should avoid manually editing related .plist.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#87

Post by throwaway290 »

riolu wrote: post #85
throwaway290 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sometimes people do actually want to clean up There are two scenarios I want the cleanup to happen: 1) app is buggy and I'm trying to fix it by reinstalling from scratch, 2) I need to free disk space. Both are pretty rare, and in the second case I am already using a specialized utility like DaisyDisk to see where my space has gone. > transient data files /tmp? That gets actually auto cleaned up! > settings Maybe. D…

> 1) app is buggy and I'm trying to fix it by reinstalling from scratch You don't specify and it's highly dependent but in most cases when an app is misbehaving it's an issue with preferences. You can reset most apps with `defaults` without blowing away all its data. There are some intricacies with how macOS handles preferences, so you should avoid manually editing related .plist.

Note that if I am trying to fix an app that I want to keep using I sure as hell may want to keep the preferences.

The case where I want it to auto clean up is where it is repeatedly broken and I never really got to using and configuring it yet. It's pretty rare.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#88

Post by riolu »

klodolph wrote: post #82
cush wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a tradeoff between an incredibly user-friendly install experience for non App Store apps, vs a clean uninstall experience. The OS doesn’t know what files that app created, thus can’t clean them up.

The OS also doesn’t know when you uninstall an app whether the app is really gone. You could have copied it to a network drive first, or maybe you have a different version of the app in a folder somewhere. Who knows?

Apps that install persistent services typically check if the .app bundle exists in applications so in most cases just trashing the .app is enough to stop any errant left overs from executing.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#89

Post by soraminazuki »

MissTake wrote: post #4
mdmglr wrote: post #2

I recently had to uninstall some apps and it’s common for apps to litter files throughout /Library and ~/Library. The UX from early MacOS days is you can drag/drop the App to the Trash Can to uninstall it. Does MacOS actually clean up the misc. files applications leave at some point?

Nope, still leaves them behind. I’ve been using AppCleaner ( https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ ) for years now and it’s a real neat (and free) app that’ll do a pretty decent job of cleaning up crud.

Homebrew Cask can remove application-generated files if you pass the --zap option to "brew rm". Cask definitions include a list of known paths to those.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#90

Post by andirk »

AbusiveHNAdmin wrote: post #84
mdmglr wrote: post #2

I recently had to uninstall some apps and it’s common for apps to litter files throughout /Library and ~/Library. The UX from early MacOS days is you can drag/drop the App to the Trash Can to uninstall it. Does MacOS actually clean up the misc. files applications leave at some point?

[flagged]

You're not supposed to speak unkind of Apple products [0] or its peripherals North Face, Patagonia.

How is any operating system supposed to log everything an application does and then remove it? If it's allowed to add data beyond its birth directory, would not an "uninstaller" only remove whatever the devs chose to and not 100% of its effect on the OS?

[0] https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/30/39-apple-product...

Sent from my MacBook Pro

Post reply on HN