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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately many (most?) application developers don't know this either, and many of them go so far as to explicitly require their apps to be installed in /Applications, they simply won't work otherwise.

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Apple themselves have a quirk in some cases where apps that aren’t in an Applications folder get mounted as read-only.

Granted I haven’t seen the bug in awhile, but I also never saw acknowledgement of it being fixed so…

That's not a bug, it's a security feature (hack?) called translocation. It happens if you run an app that was downloaded without moving it first using the Finder.

I know what the feature is called.

I would not consider something so confusing to the end user to be a security feature. This is a bug, or you could use the label "broken".

No comment on the overall topic, but I have long made a practice of installing into $HOME/Applications instead[1], and it's rare for me to encounter software that cares. A few apps have added popups to explain to beginners "Hey, you're running me from the Downloads folder, uhh, want me to properly move myself to /Applications/?" but that's about it.

The only apps I run from /Applications that aren't part of the OS are the ones that still use "Installers" like Adobe apps, because I assume they spew crap all over anyway. I haven't tried moving those, but I wouldn't be surprised if they deeply cared.

[1] The idea being that I could then migrate more easily by copying the whole home directory, and thus all my apps that didn't require "installation" would come over.

> The idea being that I could then migrate more easily by copying the whole home directory, and thus all my apps that didn't require "installation" would come over.

Unrelated, but this is what I find so interesting and cool about the drag-and-drop to install method prevalent on macOS. People complain, but what I guess they don't realize is that all they're doing is moving a folder into their `Applications` folder and that the "wizard" way they're used to is far messier.

Granted, since I think it's up to the developers, they often seem to make the user drag and drop into the root `Applications` folder.

That’s fine, but also just means the “real” installer just runs on first launch instead in those cases, whether that is to ask for permissions or setup launch scripts or copy files to more places

But just think about how much fun phone apps could have been if you first installed an installer and than than that downloaded an app to install the side components before launching a configuration program for installing that specific software suite

Just so you know, there is something about dragging that app bundle to /Applications that causes something to happen. Because if you `mv` it in the terminal, the app often doesn't work.

It's been a while since I did this, and I can't remember the details. Sorry. Someone else might.

There is a bit of magic going on in Finder with /Applications. It’s actually two folders, one in the system partition which you can’t write into and one in the data partition where anything you install goes.

There are three of them, two you've mentioned, and ~/Applications for each graphical user too.

Sadly though macOS never has and still doesn't do any magic for ~/Applications, such as showing your apps mixed in with the rest just by looking at "Applications." But yes, it does mix in the locked system apps such as Settings and Photos with the ones you have dropped into /Applications as though they're all in /Applications as they once were. I usually just add both folders to the sidebar, and forget which is which daily.

The problem with the macOS "just drag it to Applications" approach is the uninstall. Deleting the folder will not delete user data (what if it's damaged?), and it won't delete any system stuff the app created on the first run. A typical Windows installer is likely to do the former and will definitely do the latter.

I do agree that uninstallation can be hard on macOS. I think Apple just envisions a future where every app is self-contained and putting the app in the trash really does remove everything because it was all in there.

Maybe that's not realistic, though.

I still think there's something to be said about an installation/uninstallation process that relies purely on moving files around, no custom script execution.

The "drag it to Applications, move to Trash to remove" flow was invented decades ago, possibly even back in NeXTStep [0]. Application bundles are not meant to be writeable, user data cannot be written there. If Apple envisions a future change, they’re really terrible in implementing it.

[0] https://www.nextcomputers.org/files/manuals/nd/Concepts/Inst...

I suspect Apple has little incentive to fix it since if an app stores a bunch of data in ~/Library/Application Support and then you Trash the app, then your 256GB SSD (still standard even on a 'professional' laptop, in 2025) is that much more filled, eventually prompting you to curse yourself for not spending $400 in nearly-pure-profit to upgrade that to 1TB.

Now imagine that home directory was on your iPhone and you could plug it in to any Mac anywhere you went!

Now, that’s heresy! :D

(Although you could get closer to that with an iPod back in the day! Lots of my fellow Apple Store employees kept a lot of apps and things on their iPods!)

Or on your iPod. https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/36380/home-direct...

All my Adobe apps are fine running from /Applications/gfx; I've never tried putting them into ~/Applications. They do also dump a bunch of stuff elsewhere.

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