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Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

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Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#191

Post by daneel_w »

AbusiveHNAdmin wrote: post #188
daneel_w wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll help you out by offering this common scenario: You have an application which is a normal app bundle. It doesn't update itself because, well, few developers have bothered taking this route, so you download a new version of it and you throw the old one in the trash. Now all of your preferences are gone and you have to set everything up again. That would not be a pleasant user experience, would it. Dropping the bun…

I agree. How is that "helping me out?" I never said dragging stuff to the trash should do that. I said there should be an UNINSTALLER, which is the whole topic at hand here.

It helped you understand why dropping app bundles in the trash does not clean out per-user property lists.

App bundles are never installed anywhere as they are self-contained products, hence they cannot be uninstalled. For applications that actually come in the form of package installers which may place files in "annoying" locations like /usr/local/, you also get the functionality of uninstalling the software, because these packages contain manifests describing what files go in what locations.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#192

Post by CharlesW »

gnuj3 wrote: post #10
CharlesW wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free AppCleaner was mentioned by another reader earlier in the thread, and I've been happy with CleanMyMac X.

AppCleaner is no good after you deleted an app by other means and it left crap on the hd tho… as far as I recall CleanMyMac was a paid closed course app?

> …as far as I recall CleanMyMac was a paid closed course app?

Yes.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#193

Post by kitsunesoba »

joshspankit wrote: post #184
kitsunesoba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish we had more control over sandboxes so we could put some software in solitary confinement with no possibility to write anything anywhere without asking. I’d like this a lot as well, but expect it to come with the usual griping from devs about desktop OSes improving their security models and/or giving the user more control over what third party software can do. Anything short of full access to everything seems…

There’s one legitimate dev gripe that Apple has yet to solve properly: Storage of (paid) license data. Apple deals with it for first party apps by tying licenses to the App Store, but for any company who chooses to distribute themselves a true sandbox means they cannot store license data or even worse: they have to store it “out in the open” (which is to say: in a location that’s obvious and where piraters can start…

While I kind of agree I’m increasingly of the opinion that piracy isn’t a battle worth fighting, with pirates mostly consisting of those who wouldn’t have been customers anyway.

I have yet to publish any commercial software, but if I were I think I’d go the route of Sublime Text and the git client Fork which as far as I know stop at simple local license verification. If my business were so sensitive to piracy that its existence were threatened by it I’d probably make my main product an online-only subscription instead.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#194

Post by sbuk »

smoldesu wrote: post #183
sbuk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t broken. The fact is that you and the other posters simply don’t like or even don’t grok it. So you climb your ivory tower to declare that emperor is not wearing any clothes. It’s trite, and it’s boring and it’s lowering the quality of discourse.

The broken system is not the uninstall process, it's the rift between Apple's services (the App Store) and MacOS as a development target. It extends to the iPhone, and it's such a restrictive and arbitrary process that Apple is being forced to reconsider it in Europe. You cannot sustain a system where you neglect OS-level features like software management to prop-up your SaaS distribution service. Pragmatic interpret…

You’d have a point if the status quo had changed since the introduction of the MAS, but it hasn’t. As explained in other threads, in order to offer the same functionality, Apple would need to implement tighter controls, similar to those found in iOS; you yourself have complained about these restrictions, and we'd hear the same trite iOSification nonsense, or someone blathering about user freedom, when what they really mean is freedom for developers to fuck with other peoples machines. So this appears to be yet another shitty stick with which to beat Apple, especially given that it is really no better anywhere else on the desktop.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#195

Post by suction »

tacker2000 wrote: post #15
MissTake wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[dead]

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#196

Post by nerdponx »

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…

/tmp isn't really suitable for storing the exact kinds of persistent config files that you say shouldn't be uninstallable.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#197

Post by throwaway290 »

nerdponx wrote: post #196
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…

/tmp isn't really suitable for storing the exact kinds of persistent config files that you say shouldn't be uninstallable.

How on earth transient data files is the same thing as persistent config files?

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#198

Post by eviks »

mike_hearn wrote: post #180
eviks wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows apologists are non the wiser :). Windows still has no full uninstaller that can clean the registry droppings many apps leave and other files, requiring to use specialized apps for that. And sometimes it would also fail to uninstall the binary. And Windows bizarely needs to retain the huge installers, so that part is strictly worse vs Mac

In fairness to Microsoft, that's only true for apps that don't use the official packaging format. Official packaging format? Yep, if you distribute your app as an MSIX file then you get: • Integrated automatic uninstall (which is fast). • Automatic online updates. • Apps have their registry and AppData writes redirected to a private location, which Windows can then clean up. It's a bit like the macOS app sandbox but…

How is this fair at all? 1. This is "only true" for almost all the apps 2. A much better alternative without that waste already exists in 3rd-party apps, so no new packaging format is needed to fix it 3. Is this new shiny toy MSIX the one that doesn't even allow changing installation path?

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#199

Post by eviks »

rawTruthHurts wrote: post #157
eviks wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows apologists are non the wiser :). Windows still has no full uninstaller that can clean the registry droppings many apps leave and other files, requiring to use specialized apps for that. And sometimes it would also fail to uninstall the binary. And Windows bizarely needs to retain the huge installers, so that part is strictly worse vs Mac

But we were not lied to in that regard.

The lie is that "uninstall" uninstalls when in reality it just uninstalls*

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#200

Post by DavideNL »

easeout wrote: post #187
DavideNL wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, they don’t. There are many apps which after uninstalling, and reinstalling them weeks later, prompt you with: “Hello David, welcome back”, etc. I need to login again etc. (cache was cleared) but my settings are still there. This happens even when deleting the app from ALL devices connected to my AppleID.

On iOS the Documents and Library folders exist per application in a sandbox, so those can be deleted with the app binary. Preferences like location permissions are reset too. But some things persist, like the app's related keychain data, which might contain a user session. Apps have the choice of where they store things and therefore what behavior to give users in a delete and reinstall scenario. Of course any files…

Good to know the details, thank you.

It's sounds like a good feature, however,

> "But some things persist, like the app's related keychain data, which might contain a user session."

this is also functioning as a "super cookie". Once you've installed a Google app, Google will always know it's you. Even when reinstalling/using another account.

Apple should provide a mechanism to clear these items too, and prevent tracking users.

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