And Windows does? Uninstallers are completely at the behest of application developers. No consumer OS but iOS actually provides any sort of true app level sandboxing.
Control Panel “add and remove programs” usually works?
There’s no equivalent on Mac. Yes, dragging the app to the trash is a thing but that leaves behind content in ~/Library/caches, ~/Library/Application Support, and ~/Library/Preferences . It’s been somewhat of an issue with Mac ever since they first put a hard drive on the original ones back in the 80s...
Edit: I literally cleared several GB of junk out of my application support folder left behind by just one app today, so it’s fresh on my mind. OmniDiskSweeper is great for finding this stuff.
Citation needed. That was the case in the 90s, these days most apps (device drivers aside) uninstall fairly cleanly with only settings/configurations stored in the registry still resident afterwards. Startup programs remaining after an uninstall is straight-up a bug.
Citation needed.
Instead an installer is driven by a number of "database" tables that specify the installer actions in a declarative way.
There are several benefits to this approach. The declarative actions are reversible and the uninstall actions can thus be inferred automatically. This removes the burden on install authors to create a script to reverse the install operations.
This includes registering services/daemons (will unregister on uninstall), registering protocol handlers, filetype/program associations, desktop shortcuts etc.
The declarative approach also allows the installer to roll back in case of an error during installation. This even includes "undeleting" files that were deleted. (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/rollback-...)
The author of the install script can (non-Store installers) escape and execute a specific program during the install process. This is rarely needed, though. So the default is that the uninstaller will uninstall by completely reversing the install actions.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/windows-i...
Also, Add/Remove only works if the program adds itself there. And remove only works if the program added an uninstaller. Also, even then, it still leaves crap behind.
All that does is launch the app’s uninstall process. The app is free to leave whatever crap it wants to on your system.
And why is it filled with stuff from Apple programs?
iTrash [1] is also worth mentioning. It uses the Levenshtein distance algorithm [2] to find all of the junk related to an app.
What do you think about this one?
Zoom is even available in Flathub, and that's how I use it.
Android does, too.