How to Uninstall Affinity Designer From Your Mac

Affinity Designer is one of the cleanest Mac apps you’ll ever uninstall. Serif ships it through the Mac App Store and as a direct download — both versions are sandboxed, so most of the app’s data lives inside a container that disappears when you delete the app.

Most. Not all. There’s still cache data, document version history, and shared Affinity components if you have multiple Affinity apps. Here’s the full picture.

What Affinity Designer installs

Bundle ID depends on where you got it:

• Mac App Store version: com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2
• Direct download (Affinity Store): com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2-direct

Files in either case:

• App at /Applications/Affinity Designer 2.app/
• Sandboxed container at ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2/
• Group container (shared with Photo and Publisher) at ~/Library/Group Containers/<team-id>.com.seriflabs.affinity/
• Caches at ~/Library/Caches/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2/
• Application support (older versions, before sandbox) at ~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Designer 2/
• Version history at ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2/Data/Documents/

The group container is interesting — it’s how Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher share assets, brushes, and color palettes between apps. If you have multiple Affinity apps installed, deleting the group container affects them all.

Step 1: Quit Affinity Designer

Quit it normally with Cmd+Q. Affinity doesn’t run background daemons or helper services, so there’s nothing else to worry about.

If you have other Affinity apps running (Photo, Publisher), quit those too — they share resources via the group container.

Step 2: Drag Affinity Designer to the Trash

Move /Applications/Affinity Designer 2.app/ to the Trash. If you’re using the Mac App Store version, you can also right-click it in Launchpad and pick Delete App for a cleaner uninstall.

Both methods leave the same files behind, which we’ll clean up next.

Don’t dig through ~/Library yourselfSweep hunts every leftover an uninstaller misses. Free download for Mac →

Step 3: Remove the sandboxed container

Open Finder and hit Cmd+Shift+G. Visit:

• ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2/ — main container with all preferences, snapshots, and per-document data

Delete the entire folder. Inside this container is the bulk of Affinity Designer’s user data:

• Document history snapshots (large — sometimes several GB)
• Custom workspace layouts
• Recently opened files index
• Sandboxed clipboard cache
• App preferences

If you’re using the direct download version, the bundle ID has -direct at the end:

• ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2-direct/

Step 4: Decide about the group container

If you have only Affinity Designer and no other Affinity apps, delete:

• ~/Library/Group Containers/<team-id>.com.seriflabs.affinity/

The team ID is a string of characters. The full folder name looks something like 9HNRC4K9SU.com.seriflabs.affinity. Inside you’ll find shared brushes, color palettes, swatches, and stock content.

Don’t delete the group container if you have Affinity Photo or Affinity Publisher installed. They use the same folder. Deleting it will reset their shared assets.

Step 5: Remove non-sandboxed leftovers

Even though Affinity Designer is sandboxed, a few files end up outside the container:

• ~/Library/Caches/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2/
• ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2.savedState/
• ~/Library/Preferences/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2.plist (rarely present, but check)
• ~/Library/Logs/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2/

Delete each. Sandboxed apps usually keep these inside the container, but Affinity has a few exceptions.

Step 6: Stock content (only if you bought add-ons)

If you bought Affinity stock content packs (brushes, textures, fonts), they install to:

• ~/Library/Group Containers/<team-id>.com.seriflabs.affinity/Library/Stock/

These are large — full pack libraries can hit 5GB. They’re already part of the group container, so step 4 covers them.

Step 7: Empty the Trash

That’s it. Affinity doesn’t install daemons, launch agents, or privileged helpers. No reboot needed unless you want to be thorough.

Space recovery

A typical Affinity Designer uninstall reclaims:

1. 800MB-1.2GB from the app bundle
2. 200MB-3GB from sandboxed container (depends on document history)
3. 0-5GB from group container (only if no other Affinity apps and you delete it)
4. 50-200MB from caches and saved state

Total: 1-9GB on most machines. Heavy users with a lot of shared assets and history can hit 12-15GB.

Mac App Store vs direct download — different bundles, same cleanup

The two versions of Affinity Designer use slightly different bundle IDs:

• App Store: com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2
• Direct: com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2-direct

If you’ve migrated from one to the other, you might have leftover files from both. Search ~/Library/Containers/ and ~/Library/Caches/ for both prefixes and clean up whichever you no longer have installed.

Skip the manual huntSweep finds every leftover preference, cache, and support file in seconds. Download Sweep free →

What about my .afdesign files?

Your Affinity Designer documents (.afdesign) live wherever you saved them. Uninstalling Designer doesn’t touch them. They become unopenable without Affinity Designer or a compatible app installed.

If you may want to reinstall later, leave them alone. If you’re switching to another tool (Illustrator, Sketch, Figma), export key files to SVG, PDF, or AI before removing Affinity Designer entirely.

Common questions

Do I lose my license when I uninstall? No. Affinity licenses are tied to your Affinity account or Mac App Store account, not to the local install. Sign in on a new install and you’re back.

Will this affect Affinity Photo or Publisher? Only if you delete the group container. The Designer-specific container is independent. Skip step 4 if you have other Affinity apps.

Why does Affinity feel cleaner than Adobe? Sandboxing. macOS forces sandboxed apps to keep their data inside ~/Library/Containers/. When you delete the app, deleting the container removes 90% of the footprint. Adobe apps aren’t sandboxed and scatter files across ~/Library, /Library, and /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/.

Manual versus automated

Affinity Designer is one of the few apps where manual uninstall is completely fine. The footprint is contained, the bundle ID is consistent, and Serif doesn’t install background services.

The only edge case where automation helps is when you’ve been through multiple Affinity versions (1.x, 2.x) and may have residual files from older installs. Sweep finds every Affinity-prefixed bundle, including the older affinitydesigner (no version suffix) which only some users have. For a current-only uninstall, manual works perfectly.

Resetting Affinity Designer

If you’re trying to fix a broken Affinity Designer (won’t open, preferences corrupted) without uninstalling:

1. Quit Affinity Designer
2. Delete only ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2/Data/Library/Preferences/
3. Relaunch — Designer rebuilds preferences

This is much faster than a full reinstall and fixes most preference-related issues.