Just Kidding: You Won’t Be Able to Uninstall Recall

I had a lot of questions when the latest Windows 11 version 24H2 preview update included a way to uninstall Recall. And it turns out I was right to question this change, which didn’t make sense to me. It’s not happening.

“We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ dialog in Control Panel,” a Microsoft statement notes. “This will be fixed in an upcoming update.”

I feel somewhat vindicated on this one. There are questions and qualifications throughout my write-up about this change.

“It’s unclear what this really means: Recall isn’t available in Windows 11 version 24H2 today, so removing the app is pointless,” I wrote. “Whether this change is retained in next month’s Patch Tuesday update and beyond is an unknown. Perhaps this is work being done ahead of the Recall preview, which will be tested in the Windows Insider Program. Perhaps it’s just a mistake or a test. No one outside of Microsoft knows. And no one inside of Microsoft is saying a thing, as usual.”

Well, now they are saying a thing. And that thing is what I suspected: This was only a mistake.

This says a lot about the quality of Windows these days, of course. But I’ve done enough editorializing on that topic. I’ll just add this: Whether Recall can be “uninstalled” is sort of beside the point. For all the misplaced drama around this maligned feature, the big net win so far is that it won’t be auto-enabled by default, so anyone nervous about using Recall can simply ignore it. You know, whenever it hits stable in 2025. It’s still not even available for testing as I write this.