Uninstalling a Mac app completely: the eleven places it leaves things behind

The Mac has no uninstaller. Dragging an app to the Trash has always been the official method, and it has always been incomplete: the app bundle goes, and everything the app wrote into your Library folder stays. For a small utility that is a preferences file. For a creative suite it can be gigabytes of caches, support files and background agents that keep running after the app that owned them is gone.

SweepyMac's Applications module exists to do the drag properly. This is where it looks and what it does.

The eleven places

When you click an app in the list, the uninstall sheet shows the application itself, always included, and below it the leftovers it found in your Library, each individually selectable. They come from eleven locations:

• Application Support, where most apps keep their working files
• Caches, rebuilt on demand but often the largest item
• Logs
• Preferences, the plist files that hold your settings
• Containers and Group Containers, where sandboxed apps keep everything
• Saved Application State, the window layout macOS restores
• HTTP Storage and WebKit, for apps with a built-in web view
• Cookies
• Launch Agents, the files that make something start at login

Matching is done by the app's bundle identifier, not its name, which is the difference between finding the right folder and finding a folder that happens to share a word with the app. If the app list or a Library folder could not be fully read, the sheet shows a warning on the affected leftovers, because in that situation a match could belong to another app and you should look before ticking.

What the list shows

Every app from your Applications folder and the one in your home folder, including subfolders such as Utilities and the folders Setapp and similar tools create, with icon, version and size. The search box matches on name or bundle identifier, and the sort picker switches between name and size. Sorting by size is the usual first move: the apps you forgot about are rarely small.

The uninstall itself

Quit the app first. If it is running, the sheet says so, because a live app will recreate its caches and preferences as fast as they are removed. Then tick the leftovers you want gone, press Uninstall, confirm, and the app and everything selected move to the Trash. The result bar reads "Uninstalled X — freed Y" with an Undo button. Nothing has been permanently deleted. If the next week reveals you needed it, Undo or Finder's Put Back restores the lot.

Leaving a leftover unticked is sometimes right. Preferences for an app you plan to reinstall are worth keeping; a licence file hidden in Application Support is worth keeping. The sheet lists them so you can make that call per item rather than per app.

Apps that need a password

Two kinds of app cannot be moved by a normal user: apps owned by the root user, and apps installed from the Mac App Store. For these the sheet shows a banner and a button labelled "Uninstall (asks for password)", which moves the app with the standard macOS administrator prompt. Because restoring a root-owned bundle would need that prompt again, these are not one-click undoable from inside SweepyMac; the result bar offers Open Trash instead, and the app is still there to drag back. You can also choose Reveal in Finder and handle it yourself.

If an uninstall fails for any other reason, the bar says "Couldn't uninstall" and offers Reveal in Finder or the Full Disk Access setting, which is the usual cause.

Why not just use the app's own uninstaller

Some apps ship one, and if it exists it is worth running, since it knows about files SweepyMac cannot guess at. But most do not, and the ones that do rarely clean the Library locations above. Running the app's uninstaller first and then checking SweepyMac's list for what it missed is the thorough version.

Leftovers from apps already gone

If the app is no longer installed, its leftovers are not in the Applications module, because there is no app to click. They are in Cleanup instead, under App Leftovers, which lists the support files and containers of apps that are gone and have not been written to in sixty days. That category starts unticked for the reasons covered in Smart Scan or Cleanup.