A reader shares a blog post that talks about why Mac running High Sierra 10.13.2 (and other versions near it) refuses to let users uninstall some third-party applications easily. For instance, when users attempt to uninstall BlueStacks, an Android emulator, the Finder shows this warning: "The operation can't be completed because you don't have the necessary Permission." The blog post looks into the subject: The moment that we see the word permission, all becomes clear: it's a permissions problem. So the next step is to select the offending item in the Finder, press Command-I to bring up the Get Info dialog, and change the permissions. It does, though, leave the slight puzzle as to why the Finder didn't simply prompt for authentication instead of cussedly refusing. Sure enough, after trying that, the app still won't go and the error message is unchanged. Another strange thing about this 'app' is that it's not an app at all. Tucked away in a mysterious folder, new to High Sierra, in /Library/StagedExtensions/Applications, its icon is defaced to indicate that the user can't even run it. Neither did the user install it there. Trying to remove it using a conventional Terminal command sudo rm -rf /Library/StagedExtensions/Applications/BlueStacks.app also fails, with the report Operation not permitted.

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