From my experience at least 99% of Apple users have no idea how to delete app on Mac the
correct way.
Simply how to uninstall Mac app with all the associated files.
So I decided to make a video tutorial, show most used and recommended methods, explain
why the official methods are bad idea to use and of course show you the right way how to
delete apps on Mac.
So let's go.
To better understand what's wrong with offical methods let's first have a look how it works.
The official Apple support documentation recommends two ways.
First one is opening Launchpad app on your Mac, holding ALT or Option key until apps
will start to jiggle and then just simply click the X or cross to delete it.
Problem is, it works only for Apple apps and apps from App Store.
What if you wanna delete app which is not from Apple?
As you can see there's no X or cross in circle next to my 3rd party installed apps.
So, this is useless way :)
OK so second option Apple recommends is to use Finder to delete app on Mac.
This is the easiest way.
Just open Finder window, locate app you want to delete and just move it to your trash or
hit Command + Backspace.
And empty trash.
Easy right?
Yes, but also useless, because this way you will delete only the app from your Applications
folder, but don't forget - every app on macOS will have it's associated support files which
are located in System folders and not just in Applications folder.
So if you want to delete any app on Mac the correct way, you should uninstall or delete
all of it's files, not just few of them.
Fortunatelly it's also super easy to do, let's have a look.
I will show you example on huge app in size - Illustrator - the only app from Adobe I
use on this computer.
This whole folder contains Illustrator app itself and also tons of other files, whole
folder is in total 2.64GB in size.
Remember this number, in a moment you will see why.
So if you would just trash this folder as Apple recommends you would free up 2.64gigs
on your disk.
Now have a look at the correct way.
Open any Finder window and in top right corner type name of macOS app you want to delete,
in my case Illustrator.
As you can see it found 182 items in total on This Mac.
But thats still not all the files which belongs to my Illustrator.
In top right corner click on the small plus button.
We don't want to limit search for files which matches certain name.
We want to list also System Files.
At default this option is disabled, to be able to see it, click on the bottom on the
Other, search for system and enable it to show "In Menu".
So now in the dropdown choose System files and change this to "are included".
Bang, now as you can see on the bottom it listed 400 files instead of just 182 as before.
And lot of those files are located in Library folders, Application Support etc.
So if I calculate size of all these 400 files it's 4.93 GB, the Illustrator app folder is
just 2.64 GB.
That means the offically recommended ways by Apple itself how to delete app on Mac are
absolutely wrong, because they would keep 2.29 GB of data as leftovers on your disk.
So now just move those 400 files to trash and empty the trash.
Done.
Before you will delete all those files, just make sure some of it's system components are
not shared with some other apps.
You may ask isn't there some more elegant way?
Glad you asked :) yes, there is amazing FREE application called AppCleaner with support
from Mac OS 10.6 up to currently latest macOS 11 Big Sur.
No installer needed, just download the app, unzip the archive and place it to your Applications
folder.
Open the AppCleaner and just drag any application you want to delete on your Mac to the AppCleaner
window.
Bang, as you can see it also listed for the various support files hidden in system folders.
Now just on the bottom click on Remove, empty trash and you're done.
I personally use combination of these two methods.
I always compare results from both before deleting any files forever.
So now you know how easy is to delete apps on your Mac the correct way :) If you would
need any help with Apple Mac, Windows, Linux or server build, you can join my website membership
(link is in this video description) and I will personally help you using video call
and remote session directly to your computer in front of your eyes.
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Bye bye my Macintosh friends.