Uninstall Podman Desktop on Mac

Decide whether you want to remove only the Podman Desktop interface or also the Podman engine and its machines. They are separate installations, and containers, images, and volumes inside a machine are not ordinary caches. Removing Podman Desktop does not remove Podman, its machines, or Kubernetes clusters you created. These steps follow Podman Desktop's uninstall instructions for the DMG and the Homebrew cask.

Save work and stop machines

Export or back up required container data, databases, and files, then verify the copies. Stop writes and the relevant Podman machine. If you are removing only the desktop interface while continuing to use the CLI, keep the engine and machines and skip the next section.

Optional: remove the Podman engine and its machines

Do this only after the backups above, because the first command deletes every Podman machine with the containers, images, and volumes inside it:

podman machine reset -f

Then remove Podman the way it was installed. If you installed it with Homebrew, run brew uninstall podman. If Podman Desktop's setup installed it, the vendor's steps uninstall the podman-mac-helper service, then remove the PATH entry and the /opt/podman folder:

sudo /opt/podman/bin/podman-mac-helper uninstall

Continue only if the helper uninstaller succeeds. If it fails or reports an error, stop here and keep the installed helper files available while resolving that error. Then run the following two commands one at a time, stopping if either fails:

sudo rm /etc/paths.d/podman-pkg
sudo rm -rfv /opt/podman

Podman's own files and configuration are in ~/.local/share/containers/podman and ~/.config/containers/podman. Remove those two folders only. ~/.local/share/containers/storage is optional storage configuration, and the parent ~/.local/share/containers may serve other container tools; do not delete it wholesale. Kind and Minikube clusters are separate from Desktop removal. Delete a cluster only after identifying it as part of this removal and verifying its data backup: choose that named cluster in the UI, or replace <cluster-name> with its confirmed name in kind delete cluster --name <cluster-name>; for Minikube, replace <profile-name> with the confirmed profile in minikube delete --profile <profile-name>. Keep unrelated clusters and profiles. See Kind’s named-cluster deletion and Minikube’s profile-specific deletion.

Remove Podman Desktop

Quit Podman Desktop and move it from Applications to the Trash. If it opened at login, check System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions afterward. Then decide about ~/.local/share/containers/podman-desktop: it holds Desktop's configuration and, in extensions-storage, the binaries and plugins its extensions installed. Open it with Shift + Command + G in Finder.

Check the result

pgrep -il podman
podman machine list
ls -d ~/.local/share/containers/podman-desktop ~/.local/share/containers/podman ~/.config/containers/podman

No output from pgrep only means no process name matched podman; a machine can run through a differently named hypervisor, such as vfkit or krunkit. If you kept the CLI, podman machine list shows the machines you kept and their running status; a remaining machine does not mean Desktop removal failed, and an empty list only describes machines in the current Podman environment. command not found means the Podman CLI is gone from this shell's PATH, not that every data file is gone. For ls, No such file or directory means that folder is gone; a listed path is still on disk. A command-line container that still runs shows the engine remains available, not that the desktop app failed to uninstall.

If you installed it with Homebrew

Mole skips --zap when its list reaches unchecked or shared data, or cannot be fully checked, and still cleans the leftovers you selected.

Running brew uninstall --cask --zap podman-desktop yourself runs the zap list whatever you checked in Mole. It trashes ~/.local/share/containers/podman-desktop, with Desktop's settings and extension storage, and ~/Library/Application Support/Podman Desktop, plus preferences and saved state; the cask's uninstall step also removes its login launch agent. It does not touch the Podman engine, its machines, or ~/.local/share/containers/podman. Back up Desktop's folder first, or run brew uninstall --cask podman-desktop without zap to keep it.

What Mole lists

With Remove data and settings with apps off, the default, the two reviewed Desktop data folders stay unchecked. Enabling it can preselect eligible app-owned data; untick them if you want to keep Desktop settings and extension storage.

Mole never lists the ~/.local/share/containers parent, the Podman engine folders, machines, or /opt/podman.

What this test covered

Podman Desktop was installed from the Homebrew cask on September 19, 2026 and uninstalled through Mole, which ran the zap list. The zap step removed ~/.local/share/containers/podman-desktop before Mole reached it, which is why Mole lists it for users of the DMG. Its login item was gone after the uninstall. Removing the Podman engine, machines, and Kubernetes clusters was not tested.