Uninstalling Optically

It comes off in one click, from its own menu — and that is the only route that also takes back the Accessibility permission you granted it. We would rather hear what went wrong: tell us and a real person reads it. But nothing on this page asks you to explain yourself first.

If the volume keys stopped working rather than the app annoying you, the support page probably names the reason. Most of them are a permission or an output setting.

The one-click way

• Right-click, or Control-click, the Optically icon in your menu bar.
• Choose Uninstall Optically….
• Read what it is about to remove, then confirm.

It asks before it does anything, and the alert lists the lot:

• the app itself, moved to the Bin
• your settings and chosen speaker
• the log file
• its Accessibility and Automation permissions
• its Open at Login entry
• the licence stored on this Mac

It clears the Local Network permission too, which the alert does not name. Cancel is the default button, so a stray Return key does nothing. When you do confirm, Optically quits. Nothing on your speakers changes, and your Mac’s own volume keys go back to normal.

Why not the Bin

Because dragging the app away cannot clear the permissions, and after that neither can anything else.

macOS records a privacy grant against the app it belongs to, and clearing one means naming that app — which macOS resolves by looking the bundle up on disk. Once Optically is in the Bin there is nothing left to look up, so the Accessibility, Automation and Local Network entries stay in System Settings, listed against an app that no longer exists. Automation entries are the worst of it: that pane gives you no way to remove one at all.

So the uninstaller clears the grants first, while the app is still where it was, and moves itself to the Bin afterwards. That order has one visible consequence. Moving the app needs your authorisation, and if you decline it you are left with Optically installed and its permissions already cleared — it says so, and it will ask for Accessibility again the next time it launches. Your settings are untouched. That is one tick to recover from. A permission you can never remove is not.

If it says it is still installed

When the move to the Bin fails, Optically tells you it is still installed, says why, and offers Show in Finder. Drag Optically.app to the Bin yourself and the removal is finished — the permissions and everything else were already dealt with.

What dragging it to the Bin leaves behind

Being straight about it, because a menu bar app with no window is an awkward thing to be left with pieces of:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Optically — settings.json: your chosen speaker, which output the keys apply to, and the speaker’s last known address on your network.
• ~/Library/Logs/Optically.log, and Optically.log.1 if the log has rotated.
• The Open at Login entry, if you left it on. macOS reports a login item pointing at a deleted app as broken.
• Your licence, in your login keychain under app.optically.license. That one survives deletion on purpose, so reinstalling after a problem does not mean hunting for the email — which is exactly why removing it has to be a deliberate step.
• Its rows in System Settings → Privacy & Security: Accessibility, Local Network, and Automation. The Automation grants are the ones it collects from asking Music, TV and Spotify what is playing.

None of it does anything once the app is gone. The privacy rows are the part that matters, both because they are untidy and because a reinstall with the same identity would quietly inherit the old answers.

If you have already dragged it to the Bin

Put it back and let it remove itself. Take Optically.app out of the Bin and into your Applications folder, open it, then right-click the menu bar icon and choose Uninstall Optically…. That is the only route that clears the permissions, and it works the same the second time as the first.

If you would rather not, delete the files listed above by hand. The Accessibility and Local Network rows can be removed in System Settings by selecting Optically and pressing the − button. The Automation rows cannot be, and will stay.

Before you go, if you bought it

Uninstalling removes the licence from this Mac. It does not free the seat that Mac is using, so if you are moving to another machine, do that part first: right-click the menu bar icon, open Licence — your name, and choose Deauthorise This Mac. That releases the seat and removes the stored licence in one action.

If it was not what you wanted, the refund policy is 30 days and needs no reason — the refund button on your licence page does the whole thing in one click, or tell us.

And if you change your mind

Nothing here is held against you. The download stays where it is, and a licence you bought is yours whether Optically is installed or not — it is a signed file checked on your own Mac, so reinstalling is a download and a sign-in.

One thing to know before you reinstall: removing Optically does not start the trial over. Trials are counted against an anonymous fingerprint of the Mac, so fourteen days are fourteen days rather than fourteen days per reinstall. If you ran out of time before you could test it properly, say so and we will sort it out.