Windows uninstall scripts often do the same. Some have an option of removing data files, some just leave them behind. I don’t have any statistics but I see no reason to believe the situation is any «better» on windows. Also, I am sure people will disagree on whether it is better to remove data files or leave them.

Not surprising, but at least devs are given a clear way to behave well if they want. I do think all desktop operating systems were overly loose with apps touching files, though.

Also, desktop app devs tend to touch files in a myriad places that you’d never expect. The os can never solve that anyway.

It could solve that if they wanted to make it like iOS apps by default, and only go outside that for less common situations like dev tools. I kinda expected Mac App Store apps to be fully sandboxed that way, not the partial thing we have.

Of course it can, that's what sandboxes are for

One advantage to leaving the configs around is that the next time you install the app, yiu get it set up just the way you had it before.

Also, AFAIK, this mirrors how command line utils would work.

Why would you remove an app if you want it to stay set up? iPhone has the "deleting an app will remove its data" thing for this reason.

Ironically, removing many iPhone apps does not delete its data (as far as the user is concerned) because the data is actually in the cloud somewhere.

It also removes the preferences/caches for the app, but not its keychain data.

It would be nice to be able to delete Robin Hood if you go negative

Lots of possible reasons:

- You used a trial version of a software, or other time limited license, and want to keep the output from that around.

- You are upgrading and that particular app requires uninstalling the old version before installing the new version

- You run out of disk space and want to uninstall a game but don’t want to lose you’re progress

That’s just what immediately comes to mind but suffice to say any workflow will have legitimate counter examples.

User can back up files in all those cases, but if this is really an issue, the "data will be deleted" dialog can have a button to say no. The way it is now is the worst. It's so unclear what you need to do to actually uninstall something that people go download stuff to do it, often malware.

I agree the current process is shit. But that’s not the point I was countering.

To be honest, I think the way Windows handles uninstalls is shit too. I don’t think either desktop OS has got it right.

Their respective app stores are an improvement on the status quo. But unfortunately they turned them into an ad riddled, proprietary mess that is more designed for their benefit than the end users.

You should search for portable apps. For me it's the only good thing about windows.

These sometimes exist, sometimes not, because exes aren't really designed to bundle files inside. I would expect the portable exe to be slower too. Mac apps are designed to be truly portable.

Of course it's not always an installer, there are "portable" zips on Windows as well The dmg makes sense this way- you can have some filesystem-specific tricks in your app (special links) that might not be zippable, so you need dmg that is a more compatible container. And deleting the app shouldn't clear everything (like user config) without a prompt, but otherwise it's indeed a big issue in how all the OSes are designed.

.apps are already folders, unlike .exes, so .app.zip is already sufficient. You do need .dmg for symlinks I think, but nobody is symlinking inside their app bundles, or shouldn't be.

This one time I ran a debloater for Windows 10. It removed all the UWP apps.

It turned out Minecraft Bedrock was an UWP app.

It also turned out that UWP programs, unlike traditional Windows programs, store their data inside of the application folder.

So not only did it delete the game, but also the game world I had just spent two weeks working on.

(Apparently you're supposed to run the debloater before doing anything else with the computer!)