Back in February we released a version of Gears with AppRemover built-in. AppRemover is a popular OPSWAT application designed to automatically uninstall software, including notoriously difficult to remove antivirus programs. Why would we build software to uninstall antivirus applications? Because running more than one antivirus product on your system at a time can lead to performance issues and false positives. Because of the way security applications perform malware detection, it's very common for them to detect each other as suspicious. Therefore when you are installing a new antivirus or anti-malware product, it's important that you remove any competing products.
Not limited to removing security software, AppRemover is capable of automatically removing over 1000 different applications! It doesn't merely call the native application uninstaller; it is a fully automated solution — you can select multiple apps to uninstall, sit back and let it do the work. The same technology is used when calling the Uninstall feature from the cloud management console, so no manual intervention is required for remotely remediating machines.
Using AppRemover is simple. When Gears starts up it, will begin scanning for installed applications on the system, classify them and create an index. Applications deemed risky or unwanted will appear in red on the home tab, all other removable applications will appear in blue. The rest of the process is self-explanatory for users.
A count of detected applications is shown on the home tab (Click to enlarge)
List of applications available for removal (Click to enlarge)
removal complete, a reboot is required for AVG only (Click to enlarge)
AppRemover is built with heuristics and machine learning algorithms, so the more it is used, the more intelligent it becomes. So even though it supports over 1000 applications already, the number will continue to grow over time and will even adapt to new or changed uninstallation interfaces as products get updated.
Expect to see additional enhancements coming soon, such as integration with the Gears cloud unwanted application policy, an on-demand version, and an improved user interface.
