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

201–208 of 208 posts

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#201

Post by AbusiveHNAdmin »

daneel_w wrote: post #191
AbusiveHNAdmin wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, becaus…

Why are you telling ME this? I never said trashing app bundles clears out property collections or settings.

You must be replying to the wrong person.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#202

Post by mike_hearn »

eviks wrote: post #198
mike_hearn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The problems you're describing are technically problems of apps, not really problems of Windows (any more). Yes arguably the line is blurred, you can say this is a pedantic distinction because Windows = the apps that people use. But the tech is there.

MSIX indeed picks the install path for you but very few users want to change it these days. Chrome installer doesn't let you pick either.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#203

Post by eviks »

mike_hearn wrote: post #202
eviks wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The problems you're describing are technically problems of apps, not really problems of Windows (any more). Yes arguably the line is blurred, you can say this is a pedantic distinction because Windows = the apps that people use. But the tech is there. MSIX indeed picks the install path for you but very few users want to change it these days. Chrome installer doesn't let you pick either.

The old tech is also the official OS one, so all the responsibility for not fixing it lies with the OS, can't blur it with the apps

Having a better alternative while still not fixing the old system does not shield the OS from this.

Neither does the existence of other bad apps like Chrome shield the new system from the blame for making the same obvious mistake, especially when the example of macOS with its simple bundled app folders that you can just drag&drop around has been right there the whole time

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#204

Post by joshspankit »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #193
joshspankit wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it…

I’m increasingly of the same opinion as well, but that choice is up to the companies and developers who make the software and if they decide to implement license verification there’s no way to do that reliably within a sandbox (unless of course it’s online-only, but then you get a whole different issue affecting offline users)

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#205

Post by Groxx »

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…

Cache files are frequently non-trivial in size and go into ~/Library/Caches, and those are not cleaned up automatically.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#207

Post by kergonath »

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…

Definitely agree. Getting all the licenses in order is a huge pain when setting up a machine. I use notes in the iCloud Keychain but that’s a bit of a kludge. Some first party support would be great. The infrastructure is already there for this stuff to be encrypted and protected properly.

Re: Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

#208

Post by mike_hearn »

eviks wrote: post #203
mike_hearn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems you're describing are technically problems of apps, not really problems of Windows (any more). Yes arguably the line is blurred, you can say this is a pedantic distinction because Windows = the apps that people use. But the tech is there. MSIX indeed picks the install path for you but very few users want to change it these days. Chrome installer doesn't let you pick either.

The old tech is also the official OS one, so all the responsibility for not fixing it lies with the OS, can't blur it with the apps Having a better alternative while still not fixing the old system does not shield the OS from this. Neither does the existence of other bad apps like Chrome shield the new system from the blame for making the same obvious mistake, especially when the example of macOS with its simple bund…

Your post went dead for some reason, but that seemed unfair so I vouched for you and upvoted it. We may not fully agree on this, but your discussion is civilized and should not have been flagged.
Post reply on HN