Uninstall Desktop App changes
Update (Last updated: September 8, 2017 at 16:50 pm)
The plot thickens with regards to Desktop App. Stay tuned for an update, since some of this information will either change slightly or be added to.
I am not a fan of Autodesk Desktop App (ADA), formerly Autodesk Application Manager (AAM), or as I like to call it; Autodesk Totally Useless Redundant Downloader. It has four major flaws in my mind.
- It depends on the user being a Local Admin to work. And if your users are local admins, you don’t have a secure network. Or stable and performant machines for very long.
- It depends on users to coordinate their updates to ensure everyone on a Revit team is on the same build. This basically never happens, and work loss is the risk/result.
- The rudimentary “management” available is dependent on the Subscription Access Portal, which is another Autodesk solution that I think causes more pain than it cures.
- It often just doesn’t work. Or only works some of the time. Or only works for some people. Making ensured consistency basically impossible.
If you have been using Autodesk’s BAT & SCCM based approach to uninstall Autodesk Desktop App, you may have noticed that it stopped working with the 2017 products. This is because along with the name change from Autodesk App Manager (AAM) to ADA, the name of the executable that spawns the app process has changed and the path to the uninstall EXE has changed. So, to make the original ADSK BAT file shown here work…
call taskkill /F /IM "AdAppMgr.exe"
net stop AdAppMgrSVC
RD %Programdata%\Autodesk\SDS /S /Q
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\AppManager\R1\removeAdAppMgr.exe" --mode unattended
You will need to make the two changes highlighted here…
call taskkill /F /IM "AutodeskDesktopApp.exe"
net stop AdAppMgrSVC
RD %Programdata%\Autodesk\SDS /S /Q
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\Autodesk Desktop App\removeAdAppMgr.exe" --mode unattended
If you are using my Px Rollouts to manage things, look for an updated recipe in the next few days, to not only uninstall the current ADA version, but cleanup the folders and INI files that Autodesk leaves behind in ProgramData and User AppData.
And of course your best bet is to deselect Desktop App when building your Deployments (or edit your deployment INI as outlined here if you already have them built) so ADA never installs at all.
Because
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