Why uninstalling a Home windows 11 app may not liberate any storage
Nevertheless, Microsoft does some funky magic behind the scenes when putting in and uninstalling MSIX packages—generally, uninstalling an app doesn’t truly “uninstall” it within the conventional sense. As an alternative, Home windows successfully makes it invisible to you even whereas retaining it on disk.
That’s as a result of the MSIX system design doesn’t acknowledge “set up” and “uninstall” actions as we’ve come to know them. As an alternative, an app will be “staged” (downloaded and positioned on disk), “registered” (related to the consumer and made seen), “deregistered” (disassociated with the consumer and made invisible), and “destaged” (faraway from disk).
It’s all defined in a latest Inside MSIX weblog submit written by Howard Kapustein, Principal Software program Engineer at Microsoft:
Simply as [this blog post] defined that Set up is just not actually an set up operation in MSIX, Take away is equally not an uninstall operation.
This may be shocking — generally even alarming — to builders coming from conventional installer applied sciences similar to MSI, the place uninstalling software program sometimes implies:
- binaries are deleted
- directories are eliminated
- registry entries are cleaned
- runtime artifacts are purged
In MSIX, that mannequin merely doesn’t exist.
He later goes on to say:
From the consumer’s perspective, the appliance is gone.
From the working system’s perspective, nevertheless, the bundle should be current on disk — obtainable for, and presumably in use by, different customers.
That distinction is essential to understanding why Take away is just not the identical factor as Uninstall.
Take away at all times unwinds registrations. Deletion of the bundle payload is conditional.
While you uninstall an MSIX app, it’s assured to be deregistered however not assured to be destaged. It could be stored round for varied causes, simply made invisible to you. It’ll seem as if it’s been eliminated, but it surely’s quietly present on disk—and thus no regained space for storing.
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