Apps

The Apps window lists every app on your Mac and lets you open, move, offload or uninstall each one. It has four tabs: All Apps, Internal, Moved and Offloaded.

Every app on the Internal tab gets one of four safety badges, Safe, Caveat, Override or Blocked, which decide whether it can be moved and whether you must confirm a known risk first.

Move copies an app to your external drive, checks the copy, then leaves a shortcut in its place, so the app opens from the Dock, Launchpad and Spotlight exactly as before while its space on your Mac is freed.

Offload archives an app and its data on your external drive and removes both from your Mac, freeing the most space. The app can't open until you click Restore, which copies everything back.

Uninstall removes an app together with the leftover files it keeps in your Library. You see every item and its size first, untick anything to keep, and everything removed can be put back.

The All Apps grid shows every app as a large icon you can search and open from the keyboard. A global shortcut, Control-Space by default, brings it up from any app, and you can change or turn off that shortcut.

Storage Studio lives in the menu bar with no Dock icon. Turning on Show Storage Studio in the Dock, under Settings and Interface, keeps a Dock icon too; clicking it opens Home or the popover, depending on your view.

A moved app lives on your external drive, so it can't open while the drive is disconnected. Nothing is lost: plug the drive back in and the app opens as usual. Offloaded apps wait the same way.

Some updaters put a moved app back on your Mac, and some replace an app in place. Storage Studio watches for both: it moves a reinstalled app out again once you quit it, and keeps a safety copy of in-place updaters on your drive.

When a moved app's files are gone from your connected drive, Storage Studio hides the broken entry, looks for a copy you can restore, and lets you restore it or remove the leftover link. Nothing happens without your click.

Storage Studio won't move apps that macOS or their updater would break or undo, such as built-in apps, Apple-signed apps and apps that are open. Here is each reason in plain English, and what you can do instead.