appx packaging with a clean way of uninstalling. Anki, Affinity apps), %APPDATA% is your Application Support folder on Windows (if only more software would use it), and then there's also the slightly new. There is 'mature' software whose installers will just override (update) the existing application (e.g. You can have an equally pleasant experience on Windows (after all, this is about portable apps.).

There is plenty of Mac software that requires an installer and Uninstaller, plenty of off-behaving applications that put stuff directly into ~ or ~/Documents, and even those that install some internal executables into /usr/local/bin. This way it just sounds like comparing in bad faith. You are cherry-picking the best experience one can have on macOS, and contrasting it with the worst experience on Windows. It's baffling the very feature why operating systems exists in the first place (managing applications) still isn't solve more than 40 years after the first windows release. Upgrading an app generally involve manually navigating to the app's website, downloading the latest version, install it somewhere it doesn't interfere with the previous version, then deleting the previous app folder, then praying for windows to be able to link its search results to the correct ones after that process.

If you want to uninstall two apps at the same time, you can't. You need to go to a specific windows preference pane to be able to uninstall an app, and even then most apps have a specific software to uninstall them, which sometimes needs to be downloaded separately. I was flabbergasted the last time I had to clean up a Windows computer to see how convoluted software update and removal is. Application data is almost always in ~/Library/Application Support/Application so I don't have anything else to do. Updaters just works and the new version just replaces the old one. If I want to delete an app, I go there, ⌘ + ⌫ it and it's done.

99% of the time, drag&dropping an app in this folder is all you need to do.

Best portable apps