How to Uninstall VMWare Fusion on Mac

You probably know that VMWare Fusion Pro is now available to download and install for free. You may have installed it on your Mac to test or experiment with virtual machines, but you’ve now decided that you no longer need VMware on your Mac.

But VMware Fusion Pro doesn’t come with a dedicated uninstaller, and while you can uninstall it via System Preferences or by dragging the VMWare Fusion app to the Trash, neither of these methods will remove all traces of VMWare from your Mac, such as daemons, caches, preferences, and library support files. That’s what we’ll cover here, as we discuss how to manually uninstall VMware Fusion from your Mac, including all its associated files.

How to Uninstall VMware Fusion on Mac Manually

First, you need to uninstall VMware Fusion Pro from your Mac using the drag and drop method to the Trash.

1: Remove VMWare Fusion to uninstall the application

1. Open the /Applications folder and find “VMWare Fusion.app”
2. Drag and drop “VMware Fusion” to the Trash icon in the Dock



3. Right-click on the Trash icon and select “Empty Trash”

You can also right-click on the “VMware Fusion” application and select “Move to Trash” and then empty the Trash.

This will remove the main VMware Fusion application, but many other supporting files, preferences, and components will remain throughout the macOS file system, and if you want to completely uninstall VMware Fusion from your Mac, you’ll almost certainly want to remove those files as well. You can do this by navigating to the directories and file paths using Finder or Terminal, whichever you’re more comfortable with

Then, to completely uninstall VMware Fusion from macOS, you need to manually remove the following files from your entire Mac file system:

2: Manually remove VMWare Fusion related files from macOS

/Library/Application Support/VMware/VMware Fusion
/Library/Application Support/VMware/Usbarb.rules
/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion
/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion
~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion Applications Menu
~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion
~/Library/Caches/com.vmware.fusion
~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.LSSharedFileList.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.LSSharedFileList.plist.lockfile
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist.lockfile
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionDaemon.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionDaemon.plist.lockfile
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionStartMenu.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusionStartMenu.plist.lockfile

Note that some of these are the System Library folder and others are the User Library folder (marked with a tilde ~, denoting the active user’s home directory).

Drag these items to the Trash again, then select Empty Trash to remove them from your Mac.

Finally, and optionally, and more advanced, you can search your Mac file system for VMware remnants by opening the Terminal app and using the mdfind command to locate additional components and remnants:

3: Optional; Use Terminal to Find Additional Leftover Files

mdfind -name "vmware"

After running this command, you may see a report similar to the one below, which will find additional vmware files, including even the initial DMG installer file you may have downloaded.

~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion Applications Menu
~/Downloads/VMware-Fusion-13.5.2-23775688_universal.dmg

You can then manually remove these files as well if you want to thoroughly uninstall VMware and any associated downloads or installers.

Here’s how to manually uninstall and remove VMware Fusion from your Mac. The initial part of simply removing the app is obviously very easy, but the secondary and tertiary components that require navigating your file system to locate the associated VMware files are a bit more tedious and really should be at least an optional part of the uninstall process on macOS. You can make this task a bit easier by using the fantastic free utility AppCleaner, which we consider one of three fantastic apps that will make your life on the Mac easier, as AppCleaner will locate the associated files and remove them as well.

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