Why do I receive "Products Already Installed" when installing MathWorks products?

Why do I receive the following warning when installing MathWorks products?

Products Already installed:

All selected products are already installed.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

As of R2021b, the MathWorks Installer will provide a warning message if you attempt to reinstall products that are already installed.  The MathWorks Installer will not automatically uninstall and reinstall software. To reinstall, you must first uninstall the product, then you will be able to proceed with the installation. Please see below for instructions for uninstalling MathWorks products, or reinstalling a toolbox:

Uninstalling MathWorks products

For instructions on how to uninstall MathWorks products, please refer to the following links depending on the product:

• Uninstall MATLAB
• Uninstall Production Server
• Uninstall Web App Server
• Uninstall Polyspace Access

Reinstalling a particular toolbox, other than MATLAB

If you would like to reinstall a particular toolbox, you must first uninstall the toolbox:

How do I uninstall a toolbox without uninstalling MATLAB?

Once uninstalled, you may proceed with the installation.

[Walter Roberson]

How is it a bad answer? The tool does figure out what needs to be installed or uninstalled to move forward.

The scenario it is designed for is that some toolboxes are already installed, and the user goes back into the installer and asks to install several toolboxes including some toolboxes already installed. For example the user might have added toolboxes to the license and goes into the installer and asks to install everything, using the tick box that selects everything. The installer then warns "You already have some of those installed, I will skip installing those." How is that a bad design?

The responses that I am seeing here appear to be mostly from people for who installation failed part way for some reason, and are looking for a way to reinstall.

It might possibly be a good idea to have a "force reinstall" option in the installer. However... if you have an installation that is corrupted enough that you cannot run matlab (as people seem to be experiencing) then is rewriting the files going to be sufficient, or is it going to leave the garbage around that might interfere with the reinstalled version? If you have those kinds of problems, then is it perhaps better to uninstall everything and install again?

[Image Analyst]

@Jimmy Willie Woulo, if your downloaded MATLAB installer is a .ZIP file, and it opens it in File Explorer or a program like WinZip or 7-Zip, I would extract the files from the zip archive into a regular, normal folder. Do not attempt to run the setup.exe program from within the zip archive! Run the setup.exe program only after it has been extracted to a normal folder.

[Bruno Luong]

I still don't get why such decision. It seems uninstall to reinstall creates more frustration than anything else.

All decent packaging SW one can repair, uninstall, reinstall, clean install. What is the matter with TMW?

[Kenneth Freeman]

What do I do if the uninstaller also is not working?

[Walter Roberson]

@Kenneth Freeman

For MacOS, drag the application out of /Applications into the trash, and empty the trash. You might also want to delete the appropriate folders out of ~/Library/Application Support/MathWorks/MATLAB/ such as R202b and R2022b_licenses

For Windows, delete the installation folder, and empty the recycling bin. You might want to run a third-party utility to detect registry problems and clean the registry afterwards. You might also want to delete the appropriate folders out of C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\MathWorks\MATLAB such as R2022b and R2022b_licenses

[Kenneth Freeman]

Thanks,

I ended up installing to a different location and that seemed to work. I can use your suggestions to clean up the old install. Don't know what happened with that, matlab.exe just disappeared from my machine.

Ken