Originally Posted By: artie505
I don't like Apple's having locked down the file system, but I get it. I don't understand, though, why they've locked down /Apps. I've been running with 19 of the 36 apps included Mojave and Catalina, or the equivalent thereof, having been trashed for years, with NEVER a problem.

Admittedly I had not attempted deleting "in the box" apps in Catalina but I had done so in previous versions of MacOS without difficulty as apparently you had. So when I tried to delete Mail.app (which I do not use) I got
Originally Posted By: Catalina
“Mail” can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by macOS.

...but there is no problem deleting other apps. Being of a curious nature I was interested to see what unique protections Apple had put on the "in the box" apps so I did a Get Info and discovered, to my surprise that "Mail" that appears in the /Applications folder is NOT in the /Applications folder but in /System/Applications along with all the "in the box" applications and utilities while third party apps are in /Applications.

So Apple hasn't locked down the /Applications folder rather the /System/Applications folder and all the "in the box" apps are there as well. I have no idea what the icon that appears in the /Applications folder is it does not appear to be an alias, but it may be a Unix hard link.

Originally Posted By: artie505
There have been no changes of which I"m aware.

I was not aware of this change either. While I am not yet able to verify this, I believe the /System folder or at least much of its content is not even on the same APFS volume as the /Applications, /Library, and /Users folders. So there significant changes in Catalina that I was either unaware of or at least I did/do not fully comprehend all of the implications and/or implementation.

By the way, If I attempt to drag an app from /System/Applications to the trash all I get is a slashed circle and nothing happens. Not even a warning message.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein