Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
Debbie asked: “I have a question about the app. It was on my phone and I think I pressed something that made something disappear. I don’t know what I pressed and I don’t know why they disappeared. It was only one button I pressed. So in the future, are there certain buttons that you shouldn’t press? I thought it was something as innocent as when you clear the cookies. Could that have made it disappear?”
Debbie, apps cannot uninstall themselves, operating systems reserve that right.
Unlike old-fashioned programs in computers, mobile applications can’t trigger uninstalls. At most, they can direct you to a download page, or a settings page, but whether an application leaves the system or not is always dealt with from the outside, always from the operating system level.
Clearing cookies just clears tracking data, which is not usually as nefarious as it sounds, it usually just means saving the settings you prefer, things of that nature, but it also cannot do anything to uninstall an application.
Google has remotely deleted some applications in the past. Those had slipped thought their safety net and they eventually realized they were malicious, so they removed them from people’s phones, but generally speaking it’s an operating system level thing.
Audio archived for at least 6 months