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Comment by kofejnik

6 years ago

you forgot one more thing: they don't distribute their crap as a regular self-contained .app, they give you a .pkg which asks for elevated privileges during installation (this is why I don't have it installed)

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kofejnik

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ilikepi  6 years ago

It's not to hard to extract the app bundle from the .pkg file. This is how I've always installed it. Do this from an empty directory, though, since it will just spray files everywhere...

* Use `xar` to extract the contents of the .pkg file:

    $ xar -xf Zoom.pkg

* Use `cpio` to extract the payload, which is in a file oddly named "Scripts":

    $ mkdir payload && cd payload
    $ cpio -i -d < ../Scripts

* The app bundle is compressed within a 7z archive, but the .pkg file contains a precompiled decompressor. Either use that or install your own (e.g. via Homebrew) to extract the app bundle:

    $ 7zr x zm.7z

Now you will have a directory called "zoom.us.app", which is the app bundle. Move this to wherever you want it to live, and now you've "installed" the app without running the scripts from the .pkg.

Importantly, note that the app will still exhibit the behavior discussed in the article. When you run it the first time, it will install ZoomOpener, which is the helper app that includes the web server. It will not install any browser extensions, however, which is the behavior I was originally trying to avoid by going through this procedure.

favorited  6 years ago

I almost never run .pkg installers either. Maybe 1% of apps need elevated installation privileges.