Remove Access App Icon From Site Contents After Failed Installation

Recently a user on one of our SharePoint 2013 sites attempted to create an Access 2013 App on their team site and the installation failed because Access 2013 Apps had not been configured on the farm (more on configuring Access in a future blog). Annoyingly, after the failure the grayed out installation icon remained with an intimidating "Sorry, something went wrong with adding the app. Click to retry." message.

 

Clicking the "Click to retry" link didn't help, but the message changed to "Sorry, something went wrong. Please refresh the page and try again." Of course you can imagine what happened when I refreshed the page ... back to square one.

 

Fixing this issue is quite simple using PowerShell. Follow these steps:

1. Logon to your SharePoint application server.
2. Run the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell as an administrator.
3. Run the following commands to identify the GUID of the instance that needs to be deleted.

Get-SPAppInstance -Web <Put your SharePoint site URL here> | select title,id

 

4.  This will provide you with a list of app instances that looks something like this:

5. Identify your app and copy its ID.
6. Then run the following script:

$instance = Get-SPAppInstance -web <YOUR SITE URL> |where {$_.id -eq "YOUR APP INSTANCE ID IN QUOTES"}

$instance.uninstall()

 

7. If the app was uninstalled successfully, you will see the response below in PowerShell and the grayed out icon will disappear from your site contents page.

 

I hope this helps you out and keeps your customers happy!