Removing “Contact Support” app

It seems a lot of blogs start off as either e-mail or IM conversations – this one is included in that category (thanks to Justin Chalfant).  The question is fairly simple:  How do you remove the “Contact Support” app from Windows 10 1607?  If you remember back to the original Windows 10 releases, this wasn’t possible – the app was considered a system app and couldn’t be removed.  That changed with Windows 10 1607, although not quite in the way you would expect: you can now remove the app, but there is a different process needed to do it.

It’s first useful to see how to do it manually through the UI.  Open up the “Settings” app and search for the “Manage optional features” page.  On it, you’ll likely see “Contact Support” at the top of the list, and if you select it, you’ll see an “Uninstall” button:

OK, so what if you wanted to automate that?  Well, then you need to understand that these “optional features” are part of the “Features on Demand v2” setup introduced in Windows 10 and maintained using the “capabilities” commands provided by DISM.  So to remove “Contact Support” you just need to run:

DISM /Online /Remove-Capability /CapabilityName:App.Support.ContactSupport~~~~0.0.1.0

So where did that capability name come from?  From a list of all currently-installed capabilities:

DISM /Online /Get-Capabilities

The same thing can be done via PowerShell if you prefer:

Get-WindowsCapability -online

Remove-WindowsCapability -online -name App.Support.ContactSupport~~~~0.0.1.0

And since PowerShell supports piping the results of one command to another you could do this in a single command even if you don’t care to type the whole name:

Get-WindowsCapability -online | ? {$_.Name -like '*ContactSupport*'} | Remove-WindowsCapability –online

You can do this as part of an image (removing the feature before sysprep and capture, or even offline) or after the OS is deployed.  And if it’s been removed, it shouldn’t come back when a new feature update is installed.