There is no built-in uninstaller in macOS for most applications: bundled apps can be removed by dragging them to the Trash, but that often leaves support files, preferences and caches behind. Programs come in two flavors — bundled ones, where dragging to the Trash is genuinely enough, and everything else, where extra manual cleanup is required to reclaim the disk space.
Third-party uninstallers
AppCleaner (still maintained)
AppCleaner from FreeMacSoft finds the support files and preferences left behind by a program and removes them. Drag the app you want to uninstall onto its window and it shows you every related file before deleting anything. Still updated and working on current macOS (verified 2026).
AppTrap (abandoned)
AppTrap hooked the Trash: when you deleted an application it asked whether to move the associated files to the Trash too. Neat idea, but the project has been frozen for years — the site still offers v1.2.3 with builds for Mac OS X 10.4 through 10.7 — so treat it as historical, not something to install today.
Now, what about Xcode?
Modern Xcode (4.3 and later) is self-contained: it is a normal bundled app, so uninstalling it really is just dragging
/Applications/Xcode.app to the Trash. Do chase the leftovers, because they are huge:
~/Library/Developer — simulators, derived data, device support; often tens of gigabytes.- Command Line Tools live outside the app at
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools; there is no official uninstaller, you simply delete that folder if you no longer need them. Check what is active with xcode-select -p, and reinstall any time with xcode-select --install.
The old days, for the record
Before Xcode 4.3 the tools were not a single app — everything lived in a
/Developer directory, and Apple shipped an uninstall script for it:
sudo <Xcode>/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all
<Xcode> was the directory where the tools were installed; for typical installations the full path was
/Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools. If you could not find it:
find / -type f -name "uninstall-devtools"
Easy enough — just make sure this is what you really intend to do, because once it’s gone, it’s gone. For building anything from the command line with a modern Xcode, Apple’s
TN2339: Building from the Command Line remains the reference (now archived).