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In macOS there are a lot of pre-installed bloatware applications. I know that I will never use them. Examples of such apps are: Chess, Stocks, Messages, TV and so on.

While some of them may not take up much disk space, they are cluttering the application list and Launchpad menu, so I wanted to get rid of them.

When I tried to delete such applications, I got an error saying that I have no permission to do it. So is it possible to remove apple bloatware from macOS?

There was the same question in 2011 and in 2012. They contains info that is no more actual. This question is an update for 2021. I am asking about macOS v10.15.7 (Catalina) or later.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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On macOS 10.15.7 Catalina I needed to remount root volume as read-write first:

sudo mount -u -o rw /

Then I made a deletion with:

cd /System/Applications/
sudo rm -rf Chess.app TV.app ...
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  • And presumably you also turned off SIP first, or that wouldn't have worked.
    – Wowfunhappy
    Commented Mar 1, 2021 at 2:55
  • I ma sorry, what is SIP (System Integrity Protection)? Is is specific to Apple hardware? Note, I am doing this on a macOS virtual machine from Linux.
    – Ashark
    Commented Mar 1, 2021 at 7:18
  • SIP is the whole point, @Ashark... Apple does not let you change /System just like that. You have to disable SIP in recovery (which I assume only exists on physical Macs).
    – corwin.amber
    Commented Mar 26, 2021 at 20:20

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