AlDente: how to uninstall it cleanly

To uninstall AlDente cleanly, do not start with the Trash. Set the charge limit back to 100 percent, open the app's Settings, choose General, click Remove AlDente, tick every box, confirm with your Mac password, and restart. That is the sequence AppHouseKitchen publishes in its uninstall guide, and each step exists for a reason. The rest of this page covers the parts that guide leaves to other pages: the licence and the subscription, the case where the Mac stops charging afterwards, and the macOS battery settings that were switched off when the app went in. Everything below was checked against the vendor's and Apple's own pages on 18 October 2026.

Why dragging it to the Trash is the wrong first move

AlDente is two pieces of software, not one. The app in the Applications folder is the part you can see. The part that actually holds charging at a limit is a helper that macOS asked you to approve with an administrator password when the app was first set up. Dragging the app to the Trash removes the first piece and leaves the second.

There is also a setting involved, not just files. A charge limiter works by keeping the battery controller in a state that ordinary macOS would not choose by itself. If the controlling app disappears while that state is still applied, nothing is left on the Mac that knows how to undo it. The vendor makes this connection in its FAQ: in the entry about a MacBook that no longer charges, it says some users see that behaviour when something goes wrong during installing or uninstalling, and it points to the uninstall guide as the way to avoid it.

So the useful way to think about removal is a hand back, then a delete. First return charging control to macOS. Then remove the app and its helper together, using the screen the vendor built for that job. Done in that order the whole thing takes a few minutes. Done the other way round, the recovery takes longer than the removal would have.

If the app is already in the Trash, the simplest recovery is to download the current build again from the vendor's site, open it once, and then run the proper removal described below. Reinstalling is lower risk than searching system folders and deleting files by name.

Three things to settle before you remove it

1. Put the charge limit back to 100 percent. The vendor's guide asks for this first, and suggests turning off all other AlDente features too, so the battery is back to normal charging before anything is deleted. If Sailing Mode, Heat Protection or a discharge is running, stop it and let the Mac sit on power for a moment.

2. Free the licence if you paid for Pro. The FAQ's steps are: open AlDente Settings, then General, click Manage License, save the licence key somewhere safe, and click Deactivate. This matters because one purchase can be active on up to three macOS user accounts at the same time. If you skip it, one of those three places stays taken by a Mac that no longer runs the app. The FAQ says that in that case you contact Paddle, the merchant of record, at [email protected], rather than fixing it yourself in one click.

3. Cancel the subscription separately, if you have one. Uninstalling does not stop billing. The annual Pro licence on the pricing page is described as billed annually and renewing automatically. Cancellation runs through paddle.net: enter the email address used for the purchase, open the verification email, find the AlDente transaction, click Get help, type "cancel subscription" in the chat, and follow the cancellation link. If you bought AlDente through Setapp, the subscription is with Setapp, and removing the app changes nothing about it.

The table below sorts out which of these apply to you.

How you got it	Deactivate licence first	Cancel billing separately
AlDente Free	No	No
Pro, lifetime licence	Yes	No
Pro, annual licence	Yes	Yes, through Paddle
Through Setapp	Not through Manage License	Yes, through Setapp

The removal steps, in the order the vendor gives them

The removal tool lives inside the app. There is no separate uninstaller to download.

1. Click the AlDente icon in the menu bar, then the Dashboard icon in the upper right corner.
2. In the dashboard window, click Settings in the bottom left corner.
3. Under General, click Remove AlDente.
4. In the dialog, tick every box so the app and all its files go together, then click Delete Permanently. The vendor notes this cannot be undone.
5. macOS asks for permission to remove the AlDente helper. Enter your Mac password and click OK.
6. Restart the Mac. The guide says this resets the charging settings in the SMC.

Steps four, five and six are the ones people skip. Leaving boxes unticked keeps files you no longer need. Dismissing the password prompt leaves the helper in place, and the helper is the part that touches charging. The restart is listed as part of the procedure, not as an optional extra, because it is what clears the last charging state the app applied.

One small trap: if you hid AlDente's menu bar icon earlier, step one looks impossible. The FAQ explains the setting: Settings, then Appearance, then Menubar, with Main Icon Style set to "Don't Show". Open the app from the Applications folder to bring its window up, then go to Settings from there.

Where an app like this keeps its files

It helps to know roughly what the boxes in step four are clearing, so the dialog stops looking like a black box. By macOS convention, an app's preferences and support files live under Preferences and Application Support inside your user Library folder. A helper that needs administrator rights lives in /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools, and the file that starts it at login lives in /Library/LaunchDaemons. Ticking every box is what removes that whole set together.

Knowing these locations is not a reason to visit them with Finder. Other apps keep their helpers in the same folders, and deleting the wrong one by guesswork tends to show up days later as something unrelated breaking. When a vendor ships a removal screen, that screen is the right tool. A cleaner app that promises to find leftovers is a second opinion at best.

The one thing worth keeping is the licence key you saved in the previous section. If you lose it, getting it back means using the Resend Licence Code request through paddle.net with the address you used at checkout, as the FAQ describes.

If the Mac stopped charging after removal

This is the outcome the procedure exists to prevent, and there is a public record of it. A GitHub issue titled "Battery does not charge after AlDente uninstall", opened in January 2024 on an M1 MacBook Air running macOS Sonoma 14.2.1, describes a menu bar battery icon that kept showing "fully charged" after an uninstall, even though the person had followed the guide. A collaborator on the project replied that problems like this are usually fixed by an SMC reset.

The vendor's FAQ gives the fixes by chip type.

Apple silicon: make sure the Mac is plugged in, turn it off, close the lid, wait two minutes, and turn it on again. Charging should resume. Apple's own Reset the SMC page adds that on Apple silicon the SMC resets automatically on a restart or shut down while plugged in, with no other steps.

Intel: follow Apple's instructions for your model on the same page. Macs with the T2 chip use a different key combination from older Intel models, so pick the section that matches yours rather than the first one you see.

Neither fix needs AlDente to be reinstalled. If charging still does not resume after the reset, check the battery status menu: if it shows "Charging On Hold" or "Charged to [%] Limit", macOS itself is holding the charge, which is the next section's subject, not a leftover from the removed app.

Switch the macOS battery features back on

This is the step almost nobody does, and it can leave a Mac with less protection than before AlDente was installed.

AlDente's FAQ recommends turning off Optimized Battery Charging so macOS and AlDente do not interfere, setting the macOS charge limit to 100 percent for the same reason, and turning off Manage Battery Longevity, which it says permanently reduces maximum capacity by about 5 percent. If you followed that advice, removing AlDente now leaves the Mac with no charge management at all.

Apple's page About Optimized Battery Charging and Charge Limit on Mac gives the path: Apple menu, System Settings, Battery in the sidebar, then the info button next to Charging. From there you can turn Optimized Battery Charging back on. On macOS Tahoe 26.4 or later with Apple silicon, the same panel has a Charge Limit setting between 80 and 100 percent. Apple notes that the Mac will still occasionally charge to 100 percent to keep its battery estimates accurate.

That built in limit is the reason many people uninstall in the first place. AppHouseKitchen's own post, Did Apple "Sherlock" AlDente?, acknowledges that macOS 26.4 added a manual charge limiter for basic use, and positions AlDente for people who want more control. The trade off is simple to state:

Need	macOS Charge Limit	AlDente Pro
One fixed ceiling while plugged in	Yes, 80 to 100 percent	Yes
Holds while the Mac is shut down	The AlDente FAQ says the macOS limit does not stay in effect while turned off	Pro lists Stop Charging when App Closed
Heat protection, discharge, Sailing Mode	Not offered	Listed on the pricing page
Intel MacBooks	Apple silicon only	Supported

If the left column covers what you use, the built in setting is enough and the uninstall is the right call. If you depend on anything in the right column, uninstalling removes it.

If the real problem was a crowded menu bar

Sometimes the reason for removal has nothing to do with batteries. The complaint is that the area left of the clock is full, and AlDente's icon is one more shape in the row. Deleting a tool you still want solves the wrong problem.

There are two lighter options. AlDente can hide its own icon, using the Main Icon Style setting mentioned earlier. That frees the space but also removes the quick battery readout and the fastest way to change the limit, so it suits people who set a limit once and never touch it.

The other option is to keep the icon and collapse the row. A menu bar organizer leaves every icon installed and lets you push the ones you rarely open behind a divider. Some can bring a hidden icon back on a condition, for example when the battery drops below a level you set, which suits a charge limiter well: out of sight normally, visible when it matters. How that behaves in practice is set out on the Features page, and the paid and free tools in this category are lined up side by side on the How it compares page.

What to change first

Reset the limit to 100 percent, deactivate the licence, cancel any subscription, then use Remove AlDente with every box ticked and restart. After that, open Battery in System Settings and decide on purpose whether Optimized Battery Charging or the macOS charge limit should be on. If what remains is a crowded menu bar rather than a battery question, Koffret is one way to tidy what is left.