The OmniFocus Project

How good are the app uninstallers?

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It's the app that Apple forgot, goes the tagline: the uninstaller. They pop up like mushrooms and there's always a new one waiting around the corner. How effective are they?

They're absolutely great if you believe the critics and users. Some are better than others, they claim. Yet these same people lack any means of actually testing the applications in question.

The presumption has to be that if one wants an app that can remove others, then one wants that app to remove everything when uninstalling. The question is of course: do these uninstallers get at everything?

A test was performed on OmniFocus. No special reason for choosing OmniFocus - it just happened to be there in the queue for testing anyway.

The following 'uninstallers' were downloaded for testing. Current versions were used in all cases.

AppCleaner, AppDelete, AppZapper, CleanApp, uApp.

OmniFocus was launched, the preferences panel was accessed, the application was exited. That and no more.

So what did OmniFocus leave behind? Were the uninstallers able to find it?

Next: AppCleaner ›