How to Delete Large Apps from Mac to Free Up Storage

Many Mac users have apps installed on their Mac which take up considerable storage space but generally go unused. Accordingly, Mac users can free up storage space on their computer by tracking down large Mac apps and deleting them.

The latest versions of MacOS offer a very easy way to track down large applications, see when they were last used, and offers a simple way to delete the apps from the Mac, all from a unified Storage Management tool.

You will need MacOS Sierra 10.12 or later to have this feature, earlier versions of MacOS do not include the Storage Management tool.

How to Delete Mac Apps with Storage Management to Free Up Disk Space

We’re going to sort the application manager list by size, allowing you to quickly locate what apps are the largest. Secondarily, you can pay attention to when the app was last accessed, giving you an idea of how frequently (or infrequently) the app is used and whether or not it will be missed by deleting it from the Mac.

Be sure you backup the Mac before proceeding with deleting any apps.

• Pull down the  Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”

 

• Go to the “Storage” tab and then click on “Manage”

 

• Choose “Applications” from the left side menu

• At the “Applications” window, choose “Size” so that the little arrow is facing downward, this will sort apps by size from largest to smalles

Optional but recommended: pay attention to the “Last Accessed” list as well, which can show you when the Mac app was last used

• Locate an app you no longer wish to have on the Mac and hover the mouse cursor over the name, then click the little (X) button that appears next to the app name to delete it

 

• Confirm that you wish to delete the Mac app by choosing “Remove”

• Repeat with other Mac apps as necessary

This offers a really simple way to delete any Mac app, but as we show here, it’s also an excellent way to track down disk space hogging apps that are going unused. For example, you may find that you have Xcode installed but haven’t used it in many months, so deleting the would free up some space. Or perhaps you have an old MacOS installer laying around, or a game you no longer play, or an app you just never use at all.

While apps from the Mac App Store can be downloaded again easily, other apps may be more difficult to reinstall depending on where you got them from. Be sure you know what app(s) you’re deleting and why you’re deleting it from the Mac. Keep in mind that apps shown in the Storage Management list are apps which are found anywhere on the Mac, not just the /Applications/ folder, meaning they could be housed elsewhere on the computer.

And yes, you can still uninstall Mac applications by Trashing them the old fashioned way if that’s what you prefer to do, but the unified Storage Management utility can make it easier to navigate the /Applications folder for some users, focus on large and unused apps, plus then switch the focus to other data types or other locations on the hard drive. In that sense, the Mac Storage Management tool is kind of similar to the excellent third party utility OmniDiskSweeper, which we’ve discussed many times in the past as a means of locating and recovering disk space.

Users of older version of Mac OS won’t have Storage Management tool, but all Mac users can rely on the aforementioned OmniDiskSweeper to perform a similar storage sweep task, or even use Finder to find large files on Mac by using a Search trick.