I’ve mainly used OSX/MacOS tho right out my life, but have used Windows for work. From my understanding, installing an app on Windows scatters files throughout the OS and makes it sometimes difficult to fully uninstall an app. Often times there are files that are leftover.
In macOS it’s super easy because with a lot of apps, the files are bundled within the app itself making it easier to remove.
In: 32
Installers and uninstallers for Windows software can really be written any way the developer likes.
Typically the point of having an installer in the first place is that you need to do more than just dump all the files in one self-contained folder (aka “portable application”, because you can easily install it eg. on a USB drive and run it on any compatible machine). Sometimes that’s just adding a shortcut to the Start menu or desktop, sometimes it’s modifying the registry or creating background services, sometimes it’s putting different types of files in different places.
It’s typical for applications to be written using reusable software components like libraries or frameworks. Rather than having to reinstall those components for every application that uses them, the developer can choose to install in a way such they can be reused and shared by other applications. This isn’t a Windows specific thing either, MacOS has a similar concept with eg. the `/Library/Frameworks` directory.
The benefit is that these components take up less space on disk, you don’t need to always redownload/reinstall them when installing new software, and they can be configured and updated more easily in a single location.
The drawback is that you can end up with situations where different apps use different incompatible versions of the same common component, making it difficult to maintain them (it was called “DLL Hell”). Another drawback is that when you uninstall the app, it would be unwise to remove these common components, because there’s no way of knowing if another app on the same system still needs them. So they typically won’t be removed by the uninstaller.
Other reasons for an uninstaller to not remove files is that it’s deliberately keeping user data (config files, profile data, save games etc) so you don’t lose it. That way you can back it up, transfer it, or reuse it when you reinstall the app later.
It’s also possible for the uninstaller to be poorly written, and not remove all the files it should.
Latest Answers