Windows 10 remove builtin apps script with multiple version support

I wrote a script before on how to remove builtin apps in Windows 10 that was based on Ben Hunter’s script to do the same https://ccmexec.com/2015/08/removing-built-in-apps-from-windows-10-using-powershell/

As always, make sure you uninstall what you really need some apps can be reinstalled from the Store some are harder or impossible to get back.

Not everything we can/want to remove are Apps, some of the Apps are installed as “Capabilities” instead and can be removed with PowerShell as well. Quickassist is a Windows Capability for instance. To list all Windows capabilities on a Windows 10 Computer runt he following PowerShell command.
“Get-WindowsCapability -Online”

With each new version of Windows 10 there are new apps that can/should be removed from a Windows 10 enterprise client. I have re-written the script so it reads the Capabilities to remove from one text-file and the apps to uninstall from another text file. These text files needs to have the Windows 10 build-number in the file name so that we can use the same Task Sequence step for multiple Windows 10 versions without have to create modify the script itself as shown below.

The script can be downloaded from here: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Windows-10-remove-builtin-3a65a09b

In the Task Sequence we can now have one step that runs the Powershell script and the script will uninstall different apps based on the Windows 10 Build number it is running on like shown below.

 The script will also create a log file in C:\Windows\temp with the name RemoveApps_Buildnr as shown below. It could have been placed in the SMSTSLOG folder as well but thought it is better placed in C:\Windows\Temp.

When a new version of Windows 10 is released we simply do the following:

1. Deploy a Windows 10 with the new build without removing any apps.
2. Run the following Powershell command:
   $Appx = Get-AppxPackage | select name
   $appx | Out-File -FilePath C:\temp\Appx.txt
3. Then we take the Appx.txt file and remove all the apps from the list that should NOT be removed, so the list only contains apps that we want to remove.
4. Save the file in the Package Source folder with the name Apps17999 where “17999” is the buildnumber.
5. Then we copy one of the Capabilities files so there is a Capabilities17999 file as well.
6. Update the package on the DP’s and test the script.

That gives us a more flexible and simple way to handle the removal of builtin apps.

I hope it is useful!