It ships on the system. Everything that ships on the system should be protected. Among other things, it prevents system updates from having problems when the apps they're trying to patch are missing.
No. Not Game Center.app. Grand parent is right, this is bloatware that neither he, nor I, nor many others want. If I wanted a bloatware Windows box I would have bought one. There's no excuse for making this app non-removable.
On the other hand, if we’re talking about the junk that your average Windows or Android device comes preinstalled with that is either configured to run at startup and/or modifies the stock UI (TouchWiz for example), yeah, that’s definitely bloatware and it’s reprehensible to make that unremovable. That isn’t what Apple is doing, however.
No, it doesn't, but what does bother me are the gigabyte+ apps that, like Game Center, Apple does not allow users to remove (without jumping through hoops that are probably both scary and technically challenging for most users).
Are you an Apple fan? Because I am (or was). I've been with Apple since the OS 7 days.
This lack of attention to detail is very uncharacteristic of the Apple I knew and loved.
The comparison to "what others are doing" is also very un-Apple like. Apple did not use others as a benchmark to decide what it should be doing, and the day it starts to do that is the day it's no longer Apple.
While the attention to detail is lacking, it is becoming even more walled off. I reapect that because the market wants all there stuff synced all the time. Howecer, i don't. I dont need my search results sent to apple so i can get recommendations, i font want every message i text to be an imessage so it goes through there servers as well as att. I am disappoinr.
On 10.11, there are many apps that are not deleteable, but all of them seem to be under a gig (unless I'm missing something because I had, long ago, deleted an app and the OS update didn't restore it).
These include: Game Center, iBooks, Safari, iTunes, Photos, Contacts, Maps, Automator, Font Book, Dictionary, Notes, FaceTime, Chess, Reminders, Photo Booth, and perhaps a few other small-ish apps. These are less than 1 gig. I don't know why Apple did not choose to simply make whatever is so vital in the app bundle a system framework instead.
It's not a big deal to me if these small apps are non-deleteable. I assumed—incorrectly—that the big ones (iMovie, Garage Band, etc.) were non-deleteable as well.
I used game center as an example. Of coure the launchctl list uses an insane amount of resources for apple stuff. I also deleted several other apps and a few other things. Shit, running monolingual alone saved me ~1.2GB.
So thanks. I agree as well. If possible I will turn it back on after.