Why uninstalling a Windows 11 app might not free up any storage
If you planned to free up space on Windows 11 by uninstalling a few apps, you should know that it doesn’t always work, especially if you installed those apps via the Microsoft Store.
When you download and install apps from the Microsoft Store, they come in a special format called MSIX. Microsoft created this format as a clean way to install apps, keep those apps update, and avoid registry bloat and leftover files when they’re eventually uninstalled.
However, Microsoft does some funky magic behind the scenes when installing and uninstalling MSIX packages—sometimes, uninstalling an app doesn’t actually “uninstall” it in the traditional sense. Instead, Windows effectively makes it invisible to you even while keeping it on disk.
That’s because the MSIX system design doesn’t recognize “install” and “uninstall” actions as we’ve come to know them. Instead, an app can be “staged” (downloaded and placed on disk), “registered” (associated with the user and made visible), “deregistered” (disassociated with the user and made invisible), and “destaged” (removed from disk).
It’s all explained in a recent Inside MSIX blog post written by Howard Kapustein, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft:
Just as [this blog post] explained that Install is not truly an installation operation in MSIX, Remove is similarly not an uninstall operation.
This can be surprising — sometimes even alarming — to developers coming from traditional installer technologies such as MSI, where uninstalling software typically implies:
- binaries are deleted
- directories are removed
- registry entries are cleaned
- runtime artifacts are purged
In MSIX, that model simply does not exist.
He later goes on to say:
From the user’s perspective, the application is gone.
From the operating system’s perspective, however, the package may still be present on disk — available for, and possibly in use by, other users.
That distinction is crucial to understanding why Remove is not the same thing as Uninstall.
Remove always unwinds registrations. Deletion of the package payload is conditional.
When you uninstall an MSIX app, it’s guaranteed to be deregistered but not guaranteed to be destaged. It may be kept around for various reasons, just made invisible to you. It’ll appear as if it’s been removed, but it’s quietly existing on disk—and thus no regained storage space.
By the way: If you’re using Windows 11 Home, you’re missing out on the many benefits of Windows 11 Pro. To learn more, see our comparison of Windows 11 Home and Pro. If you want to upgrade, snag it for cheap in the PCWorld Software Store: now just $59 instead of $99.
