Big Sur Made Duplicates of my Applications

bikenyc Said:

“After updating to Big Sur, I see duplicates of a bunch of the Apple standard apps.”

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A Few Thoughts:

I. Boot into Safe Mode:

Hold Down: the shift key upon boot. While in Safe Mode, cashes are set aside, and login items do not run when logged in. Also, files are fixed - files that may be causing this. So, login using Safe Mode, wait 30 seconds once logged in, and then restart. Log in normally.

II. Reset the SMC and your NVRAM:

Sometimes when changes are made to the system(i.e. updates), system configurations (i.e. for Monitors) become manipulated, technically. So, reset the SMC and NVRAM. Use a different external keyboard, if available option. It may take a few tries for each, so be certain your have snout time to perform this.

III. Reinstall the macOS:

Nothing would be lost. It's just that misplaced items would be placed back to where they should be and corrupt system files would be replaced by clean files. Go Here: Reinstall macOS - Apple Support. Use the third bulleted method: [command + r].

A small correction, at least as far as my mac is concerned:

• SOME or most system applications are now in /System/Applications, that is correct (and thanks for pointing it out!) - that includes Automator and App Store, Preview and others (but not Safari); but...
• There is no symlink from /Applications/Preview to /System/Applications/Preview, or likewise for any of the others in my system.

AFAICT, the Finder just presents the contents of /System/Applications conflated with /Applications, to reduce user confusion (imagine the posts like "Big Sur removed Preview!!! That would never have happened if Steve were alive!!!")

You can confirm that by listing the contents of /Applications in Terminal. There will be no Preview.app, Automator.app or any of the others to be found.

Yes, do try restarting in Safe Mode.

If this doesn’t help, please select two versions of one of the applications-say, both copies of Automator, for example-and press Command-I to open their Get Info windows. Post screenshots, especially interesting to is tgeir version numbers and file sizes.

I am thinking that maybe something in the part of the installation process where older versions were supposed to be removed didn’t go through. It is plain to see that in each case one of the copies has the old Catalina icon, and some are slashed out indicating that they won’t even start in Big Sur.

Indeed, you are correct, these are not symbolic links, but some kind of similar mechanism, because Finder shows them all together.

In my case, only App Store, Automator, Calendar, Launchpad, Reminders, System Preferences were duplicated and the solution helped.

AFAICT, for some reason during the upgrade process the old versions should have been deleted but weren't. I'm glad that everything is sorted out now, and thank you again for letting us know what happened. I am a little wiser now, I had not realized before that some applications had been moved to /System/Applications.

Jaluco wrote:

I tried the recovery mode and terminal fix but the applications are nowhere to be found, do i need special permissions to see it?

Are you also seeing duplicates of your Apple applications? Which ones?

I tried the recovery mode and terminal fix but the applications are nowhere to be found, do i need special permissions to see it?

I faced the same problem, after upgrading to Big Sur, all system applications were duplicated. In addition, through the usual launch of the system settings, the old version of the settings was opened and it did not work.

I contacted Apple support, they offered me the usual recovery methods, which did not help. I reinstalled MacOS via recovery mode - it did not help.

I started to analyze the problem and found out that in the new OS all system applications are located at /System/Applications and symbolic links are made to them, while in the old version they were located at /Applications. As a result, applications with the same name appear in /Application. To solve this problem, you need to remove old versions from /Application, but MacOS does not allow you to remove system applications.

To solve this problem, I had to enter the OS installation mode (CMD + R), open a terminal, go to the applications folder and delete duplicates. Be careful, act with understanding:

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Applications/
rm -rf System\ Preferences.app/
rm -rf Calendar.app/
rm -rf Automator.app/
rm -rf App\ Store.app/
rm -rf Launchpad.app/
rm -rf Reminders.app/

After that, just reboot.