How To Uninstall Apps From Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can Uninstall Apps from your Mac. 

There are many ways to uninstall apps on your Mac. Previous to macOS Tahoe one of those was to use Launchpad. But now with Launchpad gone you still have plenty of other options. 

Let's start with Apps from The App Store. If you got an app from The App Store you can use the App Store to uninstall it. So just launch The App Store app and then go to your account information here by clicking on your icon at the bottom left. Then you'll see all of the apps that you've purchased. If you see a little cloud icon there that means you currently have it uninstalled by you can reinstall it. If you see Open that means you've got the app currently installed. If you move your pointer over the Open you'll see three dots appear to the right. You can click on that and you'll see one of the options there is to Delete App. You can use this to uninstall the app. This works the same way that doing it in Launchpad did before. 

But another method is to go to System Settings and go to General. Then go to Storage. Then you'll see a graph here. You'll see recommendations and you'll see a list of items here, including Applications, usually the first item. Click on the Information Button to the right here and it will give you a list of all the Applications you have installed, including ones that you installed from outside The App Store. You can select any one of these and click the Delete Button here. When you do so it will have you confirm again and you can delete the app. So this works not just for apps in The App Store, but also for apps you may have installed from websites as well. 

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Now a third way to do it, and the way Apple actually tells you to do it on their website is to use the Finder. Just open a new Finder window and then go to the Applications Folder. The quickest way to do that is to use the Go Menu and then choose Applications. This is where all of your applications are stored. To uninstall an app all you need to do is drag it from here to the Trash. So, for instance you can drag it to the Trash just like that, drop it in. It's going to ask you to authenticate to make sure that's what you want to do and now that application is in the Trash. Go into the Trash here and use the Empty Button to empty the trash so you can get the space back. Otherwise it will still take up space until the Trash is emptied. 

You can also Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad on the app and then choose Move To Trash or select the app and then go to File, Move To Trash. If you hold the Option Key down here, by the way, it changes to Delete Immediately. It will skip the Trash and you get your space back right away without needing to empty the Trash first. 

Now what about web downloads. If you've downloaded an app from a website and put it in your Applications Folder or perhaps downloaded an installer from a website and then run it and it's put in your Applications Folder, you can still use this same method to Delete the app. You can go to the Applications Folder. You can select the app and move it to the trash. This works regardless of whether or not the app is from The App Store. The same goes for System Settings. You can select an app and delete it even if it is something downloaded from the web. 

However, if you've downloaded an app from the web what you should do before uninstalling it that way is check the developer's support page. They should have uninstall instructions there. For instance, if you go to Adobe site and you want to uninstall Creative Cloud there's a page for that. Adobe actually has you download an installer app that will not only delete the application but clean up and extra files. Some other apps won't give you an uninstaller but will give you instructions not only of how to delete the app, in this case just moving it to the trash, but also what other files to look for to get rid of. 

Here's another example of how to delete Steam. These support pages are also useful because they give you warnings about what you may loose by uninstalling or what other options you've got. 

It's worth noting that sometimes have an uninstall options built into the app. For instance, for Zoom here if you go to the Zoom Workplace App Menu there's an Uninstall option right in here. So there's an uninstaller but it's built in. You don't need to download anything else. 

Now I know I'm going to get asked a lot about left over files. People are always very concerned about what files might get left behind when you uninstall an app. Now, for course, sometimes you want files left behind. If you download a Text Editor or Image Editor you don't want uninstalling that app to delete the documents or images you may have created with it. But other times if will store extra files in the Library Folder, maybe cache files, or database files and you want those gone. The uninstall instructions on a developers site should give you information about how to get rid of those. Or perhaps the uninstaller that you get from them should do it as well. But you can look for these yourself. You don't need a third party app to do this. You can do it on your own without installing yet another app. 

So you want to open up a New Finder Window and then choose Go and go to the Library Folder. You probably don't see the Library Folder here but all you need to do is hold the Option Key down and it will appear and you can select it. Now in your user Library Folder this is where you'll find any of those files you might be concerned about. There are a few different places to look. For instance, under Caches would be any cache files. So if you dig down into that you can browse through here or do a search for the app name or developer name. So, for instance here it's easy to find the Firefox Cache. If you uninstall Firefox you don't need the Firefox Cache anymore. You can just drag this to the Trash and empty the trash. 

There are other places in the Library Folder you can look as well. Here's a list of some of the folders to look into. In addition you may just want to do a search in the Library Folder for the name of the app or the name of the developer to see what else comes up. If you've deleted the app you wouldn't need any of the left over Library folders. Although sometimes people like to keep them around. For instance, you may just be getting rid of the app temporarily and you may want to reinstall it later. It would be nice to have your settings and preferences and other data just available right then because you never got rid of it out of your Library Folder. 

You may want to take a look at the size of the folders before you even bother. For instance if I go into Applications Support here, then I look at an app like this one right here, an FTP app I use, I can do Command i for information and see it's just 53K on the disk. So hardly worth worrying about. 

While anything an app does should be in your User Library Folder, if you really want to be thorough you may want to use the Go Menu again, go to the Computer Level, and then look on your hard drive and look in the Library Folder there. You'll find similar folders, like the Application Support there, and anything that is saved for all the users on your Mac would be here. As you can see it is a much shorter list here. So you probably won't find much of what you need to get rid of here. 

That's how to uninstall apps on your Mac. You don't need to install an additional app that somebody else is trying to push on you. You can do it pretty simply on your own. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.