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What makes you confident an app is safe to uninstall?

Anita Mahip

I've been reading old threads on app usage visibility in Jira Cloud — ECO-470
is four years old now — and the workarounds people describe mostly come down
to the scream test: cancel it, wait, see who shouts.

For those of you who deal with renewals: when you're looking at an app you
suspect nobody uses, what would you actually need to see before you cancelled
it with confidence?

Specifically curious about:

Would you trust "nobody has opened it in 90 days" more, or "nothing in our
configuration references it"? Or neither on its own?
When an app has left custom fields, post-functions or dashboard gadgets
behind, how do you find all of that today?
Has a scream test ever gone badly for you?
Do you get a real say at renewal, or does the invoice just get paid?

To be upfront: I'm a developer, not a vendor. I have nothing built and nothing
to sell — I'm trying to work out whether this is a genuine day-to-day problem
or just an annoyance people have learned to live with. Happy to share back
what I learn.

Comments

Staffan Redelius

Hi @Anita Mahip and welcome to the community!

Interesting topic!

As a Consultant this is a very common task helping customers to clean up their instance. I haven't found a really good way to this. It is sometimes a real "Indiana Jones/Sherlock Holmes- adventure" to find out if the app is still is used by anyone. Sometimes you can find out what custom fields the app populates and see when it was last used/updated.

Custom fields created by the app can still contain information used in filters which might break if they are removed.

Many installed apps are free versions which reduces the incentive to remove them since they don't add any cost. They still might clutter the UI and need updates from time to time.

So yes, this is pretty annoying and takes a lot of time. I think most admins has learned to live with it and for good reasons are pretty restrictive with adding new apps "just to test or evaluate something"

Best regards,
/Staffan

Anita Mahip

Thanks Staffan, this is really helpful — and "Indiana Jones adventure" is the
best description of it I've heard.

The filter point is the one I hadn't fully thought through. Atlassian's own KB
article on finding filters that reference a custom field is Data Center only,
and the answer there is a direct database query — so I'm not sure Cloud admins
have any equivalent at all. How do you handle that today? Check filters by
hand, or mostly find out when something breaks?

Two other things I'd value your view on:

When you do a cleanup like this for a customer, roughly how long does one
instance take you — half a day of detective work, or something that stretches
over a week?

And your point about free apps is interesting. In a typical customer instance,
roughly what share of installed apps are paid versus free? I'd assumed cost was
the main driver for removal, but it sounds like UI clutter and maintenance
burden might matter more.

Thanks again for taking the time.

Mia Tamm _Simpleasyty_

Hi @Anita Mahip I wouldn’t trust either signal on its own.

“No one opened it for 90 days” tells you about visible usage, but not dependency. And “nothing references it in configuration” can miss content or workflows where the app is quietly doing its job.

Before removing an app I’d want to answer four things:

Is anyone actively using it?
Does any configuration depend on it?
Does existing content depend on it?
Who owns the business process it supports?

That last one is surprisingly important. Sometimes an app looks unused simply because the process only runs quarterly or once a year.

So for me the interesting metric wouldn’t be app usage alone — it would be usage + dependencies + ownership in one place.

Anita Mahip

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