Dragging an app to the Trash does not uninstall it

macOS removes the app bundle and leaves everything else. Support files, caches and preferences from software you deleted years ago are still on the drive.

  • Apps
  • Leftovers
  • Cleanup

5 min read

Dragging an application to the Trash removes exactly one thing: the .app bundle. Everything that application wrote elsewhere on the system stays, indefinitely, with nothing left on the machine to indicate what it belonged to.

For a browser or a chat app the leftovers are often larger than the app was. A 1.4 GB install with 9 GB of cached data spread across six folders is not unusual, and deleting the app removes the 1.4 GB.

Where the leftovers live

FolderWhat is in itTypical size
~/Library/Application Support/The real data: profiles, databases, downloaded contentThe large one, up to several GB per app
~/Library/Caches/Cached downloads and rendered assetsHundreds of MB to several GB
~/Library/Preferences/Settings, as .plist filesKilobytes, harmless
~/Library/Containers/Sandboxed app data, for App Store appsVaries widely
~/Library/Logs/Diagnostic logsUsually small
~/Library/Saved Application State/Restored window positionsSmall

The folder that matters is Application Support. The others are mostly noise by comparison, with the occasional exception of Caches for a browser.

Finding what an app left

Most apps name their folders after the vendor or the app, so this finds the bulk of it:

APP="Slack"
for d in ~/Library/Application\ Support ~/Library/Caches \
         ~/Library/Preferences ~/Library/Logs ~/Library/Containers; do
  find "$d" -maxdepth 1 -iname "*$APP*" -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 du -sh 2>/dev/null
done

The gap in that approach, and the reason it is not a complete answer: plenty of apps use a bundle identifier that does not contain the app's name. Anything from a vendor whose product name differs from their company name will be missed, and you would have to know the identifier to find it.

The harder problem: apps you already removed

Leftovers from an app still installed are at least findable, because you know its name. The larger accumulation is from software removed years ago, where nothing on the machine tells you the folder is orphaned. A ~/Library/Application Support on an older Mac routinely holds directories for a dozen applications that are no longer installed.

Doing it without the guesswork

Free Mac's Apps tab reads each installed application's bundle identifier and matches it against those folders, so what it reports as an app's true size includes the leftovers rather than just the bundle. Seeing the total is free. Removing an app together with its support files is the paid part.

If you would rather not install anything, the manual route above works for apps whose folders carry their name, which is most of them. And if the drive is full enough that this matters, the developer caches are usually a bigger and simpler win.

Common questions

Does dragging an app to the Trash remove all of it?

No. It removes the application bundle only. Support files, caches, preferences and logs written to your Library folder remain, and on some apps those are larger than the application was. Nothing in macOS cleans them up afterwards.

Is it safe to delete files in Application Support?

It is safe for applications you have genuinely uninstalled. It is not safe as a blanket clear, because that folder also holds live data for apps you use, and for some of them it is the only copy of your local content and settings. Remove folders belonging to specific apps you know are gone.

Why do uninstalled apps still take up space?

Because macOS has no uninstaller. An app writes data to several Library folders while it runs, and removing the app bundle does not remove any of it. Those folders stay until something deletes them explicitly, which for most people is never.

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