Barbee: how to uninstall it cleanly

Dragging an app to the Trash is where most uninstalls end. For something that lives in the menu bar it is where the uninstall begins, because a resident app leaves three things behind that the Trash does not touch: a login registration, two permission entries in System Settings, and, if a yearly plan was chosen, a subscription that keeps renewing on a schedule of its own.

None of this is difficult. It is just spread across four different places in macOS, and skipping one of them is the reason people find an old entry in a privacy list months later. What follows is the order that works, plus the part that has an actual deadline attached.

Quit it before anything else

Menu bar apps run continuously by design, and macOS will refuse to move a running app to the Trash. So the first action is to quit, not to delete.

The reliable way is from the app's own menu bar item: click it, find Quit, use it. If the item is not visible, either because it was set to hide itself or because the bar is collapsed, open Activity Monitor, search the process list by name, select it and stop it. There is a useful side effect to doing this first. The moment the app stops, the menu bar returns to its unmanaged state, so whether the quit worked is visible immediately without checking anything.

There is a second reason to quit deliberately rather than by restarting the Mac. A restart will bring the app back if it is still registered to launch at login, which puts you exactly where you started. Quit, then remove, then deal with the login registration. That order avoids the loop.

What to preserve before the app goes

If there is any chance of coming back, three things are worth capturing first, because none of them survive deletion.

The first is the list of what was hidden. After weeks of running with a collapsed bar, most people cannot reconstruct which icons were tucked away and which apps had simply stopped drawing them. Expand everything once and take a screenshot. That single image is what makes a reinstall a ten minute job instead of an afternoon.

The second is anything that changed a system wide setting rather than an app setting. Reduced icon spacing is the common example: it alters how the bar itself is drawn. Turning that option back off while the app is still installed is far easier than diagnosing an unfamiliar bar spacing weeks later with no obvious cause.

The third is automation. If shortcuts, scripts or scheduled rules were built around the app, note what triggers them. Those definitions may live outside the app, in which case they will remain after removal and quietly fail, and a broken shortcut that fails silently is harder to find than one that never existed.

Removing the app itself

Barbee is distributed through the Mac App Store, which makes this part simpler than it is for apps downloaded from a vendor site. Store apps are sandboxed, meaning they write into a dedicated container rather than scattering preference and support files across the user library. The container is named after the bundle identifier, which for this app is com.HyperartFlow.Barbee. Removing the app takes the container with it in most cases.

Two routes work. In Launchpad, press and hold the icon until it jiggles, then use the delete badge, which is available for apps installed from the store. In Finder, open the Applications folder and move the app to the Trash. Either way, empty the Trash afterwards, since an app sitting in the Trash is still on disk.

If macOS refuses and says the item is in use, the cause is almost always that the app is still running, or that a helper process is still holding a file. Go back to Activity Monitor and confirm nothing with that name is listed. If something remains and will not stop, restarting the Mac and then emptying the Trash clears it, because nothing will be relaunched once the application bundle is gone.

Finally, open System Settings, go to General, then Login Items, and look for the app in the list of things that open at login. On recent versions of macOS this entry usually disappears along with the app, but it does not always, and a stale entry is worth removing while the list is already open.

The permissions that stay behind

Managing menu bar icons means acting on interface elements that belong to other applications, and macOS gates that behind two switches: Screen Recording, for recognising what other apps draw, and Accessibility, for moving and collapsing those elements. Whichever menu bar manager is installed, those grants were made at some point during setup.

Deleting an app does not withdraw them. The entries remain in System Settings under Privacy and Security, in both the Screen Recording list and the Accessibility list, usually with a generic icon once the app is gone. Select the entry and use the minus button to remove it.

This is optional in the sense that nothing breaks if it is skipped. It is worth doing anyway for two reasons. A privacy list with ten entries, several belonging to software that is no longer installed, is a list nobody reads, and the value of those panels comes entirely from being readable. And if a replacement tool is installed later, a stale grant for a removed app makes it harder to tell whether the new one has been authorised properly.

Worth knowing before switching: any replacement in this category will ask for the same two permissions, because the requirement comes from macOS rather than from any particular vendor. If handing over screen access is the reason for removing the app, that constraint follows you to the next one. What each tool asks for and why is laid out on the comparison page.

Deleting the app does not stop the billing

This is the step with a deadline, and the one most often missed. The App Store listing states the rule directly: cancelling auto renewal is done in the Apple ID settings, and it has to happen at least 24 hours before the subscription period ends.

Removing software and cancelling a subscription are separate systems. The app can be gone for months while the yearly plan renews on schedule. Cancellation happens in the App Store, under the account view, where active subscriptions are listed together.

Action	What it does	What it does not do
Move app to Trash	Removes the app and its container	Cancel a subscription, clear permissions
Cancel subscription	Stops the next renewal	Remove the app or refund the current term
Remove permission entries	Clears Screen Recording and Accessibility	Affect billing or purchases

If the purchase was the one time Lifetime option rather than the yearly plan, there is nothing to cancel and this section does not apply. Entitlements bought through the store are attached to the Apple ID, so a one time purchase stays valid even after the app is deleted, and reinstalling later costs nothing. Billing disputes go through Apple rather than the developer, since Apple is the seller of record for store purchases. How pricing differs across tools in this category is set out on the pricing page.

If the plan is to reinstall

Removing an app to isolate a problem is a different job from removing it for good, and doing the full cleanup gets in the way.

Skip the permissions step entirely. Quit the app, delete it, restart the Mac, and look at the menu bar with nothing managing it. That view answers the question that prompted the uninstall: if icons still overlap, still disappear behind the camera housing, or still fail to respond, the cause was never the manager. If the bar behaves normally without it, the problem is in the configuration rather than in macOS.

Then reinstall from the purchased list in the App Store. Existing permission grants usually apply to the reinstalled app without further prompting. If it does not respond, remove the two entries from the privacy lists, launch the app, and grant them again when asked, which rebuilds the records rather than reusing the old ones.

Configuration is the part that may not come back. Unless profiles were synced through the cloud feature, hidden sets and automatic rules have to be rebuilt by hand, which is where the screenshot taken earlier pays for itself.

The crowded bar is still there

Once the removal is done, the menu bar returns to what it was before any manager was installed. Every hidden icon comes back at once, the divider item disappears, and the row is as long as the number of resident apps makes it. For many people the bar looks worse immediately after the uninstall than it did before, simply because everything is visible again at the same time.

Icon order, on the other hand, stays as it was. macOS remembers the arrangement of status items itself, so anything repositioned earlier keeps its place. Rearranging without any third party tool is still possible: hold Command and drag an item along the bar.

That leaves the original problem intact, which is worth being deliberate about. The useful measurements when choosing what comes next are the total number of resident icons, how many of those get clicked at least once a day, and how many actions it takes to use an icon once it is hidden. A tool that hides a great deal but forces expand, locate, click and collapse every time will be uninstalled for the same reasons as the last one.

When the symptom survives the uninstall

Sometimes the bar still behaves strangely after everything has been removed. Three causes account for most of it, and they are quick to separate.

The first is a second manager. It is common to have tried two of these tools and to have kept both installed, one of them configured and forgotten. Two apps arranging the same row produce icons that reappear, jump position, or refuse to collapse. Check the Applications folder for anything else in this category before concluding that the removal failed.

The second is system items rather than app items. Control Center, the clock, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, battery and Now Playing are managed by macOS in its own settings, not by any third party tool. If the leftover clutter is made of those, no uninstall will change it. They are turned on and off in System Settings under Control Center, where each one can be set to show in the menu bar or not.

The third is stale state that a restart resolves. Status item positions are remembered by the system, and after removing an app that had been moving them around, a login cycle is what settles the arrangement. Restart once before investigating further.

If none of those explain it, the remaining check is which apps are set to open at login, since a resident app that draws an icon you no longer recognise is easier to identify from that list than from the bar itself.

What to change first

Cancel the subscription first if there is one, since that is the only step with a deadline, then quit, delete and clear the two permission entries. When choosing what replaces it, measure the number of actions needed to reach a hidden icon rather than the number of icons the tool can hide, which is the property Koffret is built around.