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I just installed Macos Catalina. After the update I did a check on what's new and I found something new which is a double / redundant "Applicationsenter image description here" folder. Usually the old Application folder is located in Disk / Users / Applications, but now there is also an Application folder in Disk / System / Volumes / Data / Applications.

My question is: can I deleted the old Application folder? Because it's consuming my hard disk. And if I delete the old application folder, can it disrupt the app's performance?

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    I know it wasn't asked, but for a temporary fix of spotlight, you can hide that folder in privacy tab of spotlight settings. (if it wasn't changed in catalina)
    – anki
    Oct 12, 2019 at 12:17
  • There is also /System/Applications which appears to be the actual location of the intrinsic apps from the system. If you, for example, do a "Get Info" on one app from /Applications then do a "Get Info" on the same app from /System/Applications , the same Get Info window is just brought forward. With all this unnecessary complexity, no wonder there are so many problems with the latest OSs. The KISS engineering principle is a thing of the past at Apple.
    – Cerniuk
    Dec 20, 2019 at 12:31

2 Answers 2

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Can I delete the old Application folder?

No, you should not.

I looks like one (/Application) is virtual folder for another (/System/Volumes/Data/Applications).

To fix duplication in Alfred, just type reload in it.

More context:

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  • The 'Reload Alfred Cache' in Alfred worked for me, no more duplicates
    – luckyguy73
    Nov 7, 2019 at 18:55
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The /Applications folder is an illusion and not an actual APFS storage location. Due to firm links and special coding, it combines files from two distinct /Application type folders.

I linked to an excellent article as well as some Apple documentations in this similar but not identical question:

Don’t delete it, instead adjust / patch your programs that aren’t aware of this new development or break due to this change in macOS Catalina 10.15

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