Treating the Mac App Store As a Cloud Service

When you buy or download a free app in the Mac App Store, you can load it on any Mac using the same Apple ID. You can also easily remove the app if you don't think you need it in the near future, and then download it again any time you wish. You load apps with the Mac App Store and remove them with LaunchPad. This makes the Mac App Store similar to cloud services from Adobe and Microsoft.

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Video Transcript: When you download apps from the Mac App Store you can treat those apps as Cloud Apps. What I mean by that is that once you've purchased an item, and purchased it either for free or for a price, then you have a license to that item and you can download it anytime you want. Which means you can delete it and free up space and get it later. This comes in really handy when you have an app that you occasionally want to use and when you're not using it there's no need for it to take up space on your drive.
So as an example let's go into the App Store here and I'm going to search for a free app. This works exactly the same way whether it's free or not. So this app here, just a little utility, I'm going to hit Get because it's free otherwise I would see a price there and I'd have to pay for it. Once it's installed the way I run apps that are in the Mac App Store is I go to Launchpad. There it is. Unarchiver. It even has a little blue dot next to it telling me that it's new so I can quickly spot it and run it. I probably want to run something I just purchased.
Now if I wanted to free up space all I need to do is click and hold here in Launchpad. So Launchpad is how you remove apps. Mac App Store is how you get them. Launchpad is how you remove them. So click and hold. There's an X next to any app that you bought in the Mac App Store. So I'm going to remove it. Now it's gone. But I purchased it so I can get it back anytime I want. As a matter of fact if I go into the App Store now I can see instead of Get it has a little cloud and a download icon. So now I can grab that app again and easily add it back. So I freed up that space and I can add it back.
This is also very useful if you have two Macs. Say you have an iMac and a MacBook. You have the same Apple ID for both so you make a purchase in the Mac App Store and now you've got that app available on both. But you don't need to have the app in both places. So you may want to have it always on your iMac but only grab it on the MacBook when you need it. You'll be able to go into the Mac App Store anytime you want to actually view the ones you've purchased.
So I'm going to click here on my name at the bottom left and I have Purchased. Here's what I've got. So I've downloaded some free apps but again if these were paid apps they would all be there. Two are already on this Mac and you see Open there. But this one isn't on the Mac. So I could easily just click in here and it adds it to the Mac. So now I can do the same thing with that app if I wanted to. I can go into Launchpad. There it is there. If I wanted to clear up space I can get rid of it.
This is especially very useful if you've got very large apps and you only need to use them every once in a while. Other Cloud systems like Adobe's and Microsoft's work the same way. So, for instance, I always have on my Macs a Word and Excel since I have those as part of the Microsoft Office subscription. But I don't have Powerpoint. But if I need it I can grab it. The same thing for Adobe's app when you subscribe to their creative cloud there are more than a dozen apps and I certainly don't all of those. So I only grab the ones I want and if I decide to, say, use Adobe Premier for something I can get rid of it right afterwards knowing that I can redownload it later.
So the Mac App Store works in the same way as those. It just doesn't have a nice interface for grabbing an app and removing an app. You have to switch back and forth between the Mac App Store and Launchpad for adding and removing the app that you purchased.

Treating the Mac App Store As a Cloud Service

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