How to Completely Uninstall an AIR Application

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I was having a problem with TweetDeck in that it kept giving me an error when I tried to log out and log in as a new user. Unfortunately uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t fix the problem because it retained my user data. You’ve probably seen similar behavior in some of your AIR applications. The problem is that when you uninstall an AIR application it doesn’t get rid of the encrypted local store data. Here’s the solution.

Basically if you want to completely blow away an AIR app you need to go into the “/Users//Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ELS”, find your application based on the id and then blow it away. On Windows it’s “C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Adobe\AIR\ELS” (ELS stands for Encrypted Local Store).

Hope that helps anyone who’s having preference/clean uninstall issues with AIR.

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  • http://www.tweetdeck.com Iain Dodsworth

    Great tip, thanks Ryan. Did it solve your problem with TweetDeck? Please let me know if I can help.

    Is there a way I could clear the ELS programatically from within TweetDeck?

  • ryanstewart

    It did solve my problem, thanks for checking!

    You should be able to clear the ELS using the File system APIs. It’s the applicationStorage directory (I think). Let me do a bit of digging on that.

    You wouldn’t be able to capture the uninstall event, so it would have to be something in a preference screen, but that should work.

    =Ryan
    rstewart@adobe.com

  • Oliver Goldman

    The best way to clear the ELS is via the reset() method in the ELS API.

    Oliver Goldman | Adobe AIR Engineering

  • http://www.tink.ws/blog Tink

    Ideally Adobe would look into the uninstall process as most users won’t be removing this stuff. An uninstaller that removes all the databases created would be a much better approach. Adobe?

  • Elisha Arlan

    Hi Ryan. It was recommended to me that I check out this tip on removing the Air Application. I’m on a MacBook trying to use TweetDeck. It has stopped updating. Almost like it’s frozen. So I trashed the TweetDeck App + I followed your instructions above. Well, I actually went a step further and deleted the Air folder completely. Then rebooted.

    I re-installed TweetDeck which also re-installed AIR. As soon as TweetDeck comes up; my previous App settings are still there or like I said before it appears frozen with my previous settings. Any further suggestions? This like my 7th attempt. Thanks in advance.

  • Justme

    And how can one completely uninstall AIR or prevent to get it when installing Acrobat Reader?

  • ryanstewart

    Hey Elisha,

    Did you make sure to clear out your trash can? That shouldn’t matter, but it might.

    @Justme, you should just be able to uninstall AIR like any other program.

  • http://en.flash-ripper.com/ Rostislav Siryk

    Very useful article, thank you. Now I face exactly the same problem as you, but other perspective, the developer’s one. I code and debug an AIR application for client. This app downloads MP3 files from the online store, and requires user authorization, and stores the login and password.

    Now QA filed a bug asking to clear the user credentials at the application’s uninstall. I don’t know how to do it.

    In our application, we come to the following solution: at first run (like First Run howto in LiveDocs), application resets the EncryptedLocalStorage.

    Not universal approach, but pretty affordable in our case.

    I want to dig deeper in the AIR uninstall process to figure out how to implement right clean-up.

    BTW, when AIR Runtime is uninstalled, these encrypted data storage is being cleaned.

  • om

    In Vista, make sure to uncheck hidden files in folder preferences.

    The directory path is:
    C:>> Users >> UserName >> AppData >> Roaming >> Adobe >> Air >> ELS