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In the past I was able to do sudo rm -rf /Applications/<app name>. The following resources indicate that this will no longer work without dealing with System Integration Protection (SIP):

The motivation is that I am not motivated to accept updates for apps that I do not expect to use within the foreseeable future.

Is there an easy way to remove some the built-in apps that I do not wish to update, such as GarageBand, Keynote, Pages, etc., without dealing with the SIP tool?

P.S. (edited): I completely understand that there may not be any easy or even difficult way to remove some built-in apps such as Safari, Siri, System Preferences, etc. This scope of this question is hereby limited to the some apps such as GarageBand, Keynote, Pages, etc.

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  • Your first link IS how you remove the built-in apps. And that is about as easy as it gets.
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented May 20, 2019 at 21:02
  • 1
    The apps that cannot be removed are Apple-supplied apps that get updated as part of MacOS system updates. You can't chose "not to accept updates" for these apps without not accepting OS updates.
    – benwiggy
    Commented May 20, 2019 at 21:03
  • I think this is not a duplicate as suggested in the comment above. This question has the word easy in both the title and body. I just updated the question to make this more clear and to qualify that I was really looking for an easy way to remove apps such as GarageBand, Keynote, etc.
    – brodybits
    Commented May 20, 2019 at 21:32

1 Answer 1

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  • Go to the Applications folder in the Finder tool;
  • right-click on the unwanted application;
  • click "Move to trash", and enter the password if requested by the system;
  • then empty the trash.

Note the following exceptions:

  • In case an unwanted application is in the Utilities subfolder, the first step should be to navigate into that subfolder.
  • There are some applications such as Safari and Siri for which there is no "Move to trash" option.

Each of these steps should be well documented. I would be happy to add some more pointers upon request.

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  • Not without turning offf SIP
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented May 20, 2019 at 21:02
  • The answer is already true as it stand for me on my macOS Mojave system, with the two exceptions that were already noted. I just updated the original question to clarify the original intent for an easy way, clarified that I did not want to deal with SIP, and explicitly limited the scope to exactly what kind of apps I wanted to remove.
    – brodybits
    Commented May 20, 2019 at 21:43

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