Along with legacy applications such as Paint, WordPad, Notepad, and some other programs, Windows 8 also ships with a bunch of Metro-style or modern apps. Messaging, Games, Internet Explorer, Mail, People, Camera, Video, Music, Calendar, Maps, Sensex, and SkyDrive are some of the apps that ship with Windows 8.
Users who are running Windows 8 on a non-touch device or users who don’t find the built-in apps not useful may want to completely uninstall or remove native apps. When you uninstall a native app by right-clicking on the app and then clicking or tapping uninstall button, Windows doesn’t completely remove the app from your PC. Because of this, the app continuous to use the valuable disk space.
If you’re running out of disk space or want to uninstall all native apps, you can now completely uninstall these built-in apps by executing a command in the elevated prompt.
Complete the given below instructions to completely remove native apps from Windows 8 PC:
NOTE: We suggest you close all running apps before trying to uninstall them. Apps that are uninstalled using the following method can again be installed from the official Store by following the instructions mentioned in our how to reinstall native apps in Windows 8 guide.
Step 1: Open elevated PowerShell. To do this, first switch to the Start screen, start typing PowerShell and then press Ctrl + Shift + Enter hotkey to open Windows PowerShell as administrator. For detailed instructions, please check out our how to open Command Prompt as administrator in Windows 8 guide.
Step 2: In the elevated PowerShell, type the following command to completely remove all native apps from your current user account:
Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage
If you would like to uninstall all modern apps from all user accounts (if you have two or more), execute the following command:
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage
As mentioned above, one can easily install all native apps all over again by visiting the Windows Store (see how to search Windows 8 Store guide).
Thanks to WinAero for this handy tip.
Liam says
Aargh, I entered this command in the elevated power shell “Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage” in Windows 10 and guess what, the Windows Store itself got removed from the system. Is there a way to recover the Windows Store?
jfreiman says
Thank you so very much for this tutorial on removing Modern Apps from Windows 8.x.
Yesterday nearly ALL of my Modern Apps would crash as soon as they were opened. After trying many “fixes” I found on forums and FAQs, the only one which worked was to delete and re-install each app.
Since I have 60 or so apps, this was time consuming and I only got around to my most frequently used apps.
Today I found you fast solution as was able to delete ALL my Modern Apps in 1 minute and am now installing all my apps again using the Store “apps not installed on this PC.”
Bravo and many thanks!
Cendekiawan IT says
nice trick…
i think its new knowledge for me…
thank