[finchisko]

On macOS some protection was added, so apps cannot write to system protected directories.

But I was talking about all files that app creates. Like files in home dir (eg. ~/Library). If you remove the app, those files stay there and occupy space.

The only way you can partly clean up the mess, is to delete home dir from time to time (but backup important files first). Even then, there might still be files in /usr/local etc.

[terhechte]

A macOS app installed from the app store can only write to ~/Library/Containers/name.of.app.bundle. Those are not automatically trashed (as far as I know), but it is much easier to clean than the whole ~/Library. Actually, if all your apps are in /Applications it would be easy to write a small script that deletes everything in Containers that's a: not from Apple and b: doesn't have a app bundle identifier in /Applications

[finchisko]

TBH I didn't know about that. Probably same situation is with Windows UWP apps installed from store (but there is special permission to grant access to whole fs, which allow app write outside it's sandbox dir). Anyway there are so many apps that are not installed from app stores. IMO having proper sandbox is still a thing in 2018.

[saagarjha]

And there are in fact “app cleaners” that do exactly this.

[cutety]

The app I use to do that is literally called AppCleaner, been using it for years it’s one of the first things I install.

For example, the other day I moved Word to the trash, 5 seconds later I get the AppCleaner pop up letting me know it found an additional 2GB of shit that Word just littered around my machine that wouldn’t have gotten removed by just deleting the app. And unfortunately, that definitely hasn’t even been the worst offender I’ve run into, and at this point I’m very rarely not surprised by the amount of leftover crap that doesn’t get removed when deleting an app.