alt Hacker News>When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag.
And the companies that make such products _never_ care about making sure an uninstallation is actually clean.
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In the file menu of the installer, there is generally an option to see all the files it is placing on the system with full system paths. I generally note this down so I can make sure to clean things up completely if/when needed.
For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer. That actually makes it harder. For those I tend to search the ~/Library folder for the name of the app and the company that made it, hoping I find all the remnants to delete. There are apps, like AppZapper and AppCleaner, which try to automate this process. I still think it’s ridiculous that Apple never solved for this. It’s one of the reasons I always do a manual migration to a new Mac. It feels like the only real way to clean things up.
Almost never, indeed, so you need some 3rd party trash utilities with databases and heuristics. Though that's also on the gardener and his bad OS design where forced compartmentalization is's trivial, the weeds will never want to root themselves out!
"Does it have a way to uninstall, and does that uninstallation clean every application artifact?" is such a great litmus test for just how much a software company actually cares about having a proper finished product that respects the user. Nobody forces a company to do it, but when they don't do it, you can probably bet that they're cutting corners and disrespecting the user's machine in other ways, too.
It's like "Do you return your shopping cart to the cart storage or leave it in the carpark?" You're allowed to just shove your cart away and drive off, but people who do that are highly probably assholes in other ways, too.