It's not clear that dragging an app to the trash is the "official" way to remove an app, and will remove all associated data, including whatever links it to the App Store, and causes the store to not attempt to "repair" the app by downloading it again or something.

It does seem that the "official" way to remove some App Store apps is to long-press on them in the Launchpad, and then click the "X" button that appears.

Maybe I was overthinking things, but IMO neither of these methods seem very discoverable or clear about what they actually do. Would it be that hard to put a clear "uninstall" button somewhere in the App Store? Android does this, and Windows mostly does too, AFAIK.

>It's not clear that dragging an app to the trash is the "official" way to remove an app

How so? The "official" way to delete files on MacOS is to put them in the Trash. Support articles on Apple's site also show that dragging an application to the trash is one of the official methods of removing an application, unless it was a package installer.

it’s not clear because your thinking in the windows / linux world where you need to run the uninstalled or remove the package respectively. if you think about it, if you want to delete something what do you do? so i disagree, it makes perfect sense.

Can you write uninstaller hooks to run when users draps app in the trash to remove caches and other stuff? I was embarassed by the fact that most applications in macs do not have uninstallers and their trash left around the system.

Developers can, yes, and, in the cases where the developers didn't do this, there's also an app called AppCleaner that's free, lightweight, and can watch the Trash for applications that are deleted. It'll pull all references to the app in the library and remove any remnants.

And not to mention that you can't even remove some applications

Which applications can't you remove?