I can’t move applications to an External SSD

Moving an app such as Matlab is an exercise in frustration

and simply won't work. Lots of technical reasons ad to why.

The only way to do it properly is to uninstall from the internal

drive then do a new install to the external drive. This will work for

a lot of apps. But as @babowa pointed out, some apps require

being run from the internal drive for a variety of reasons such

as licensing requirement that it must reside on the host machine,

hard coded paths in the app itself, path setups at the time of install

etc.

Hi Omaralqethami,

It sounds like you're having issues with transferring data to an external drive. If that's correct, let's try the following.

Use external storage devices with Mac

The section "Move files to or from an external storage device" should help.

Cheers.

I am not at all familiar with that app, but some applications cannot be run from an external drive and/or it's a matter of the licensing agreement (can be used as a one install only). And, a second possibility would be where it is currently; in Big Sur, you no longer have access to any apps or files that are installed within the newly created read only/inaccessible volume that houses the OS and the system. So, if it is there, you may not be able to move it anywhere.