I was recently faced with the problem that on my Dell Venue 8 Pro, I could not (re)install the Facebook app. Looking for this app in the Windows Store, it kept claiming that it had already been installed on this PC.

However, when I looked for the Facebook app in the Windows Start Screen / Menu, it wouldn’t show up there. Neither could Windows Search find it, when I went looking for it.

So obviously, this app had somehow ended up in a Heisenbergian state of uncertainty between existence and non-existence on this tablet PC.

Powershell to the Rescue!

Luckily, there are a couple of handy Powershell commands to deal with Windows 8 Store Apps.

First, run get-appxpackage, which retrieves a list of all installed applications.

This might be a bit overwhelming though, so let’s try to narrow down our search specifically to the Facebook app.

get-appxpackage – Name *facebook*

This yields exactly in the result we are interested in. Note the PackageFullName property with the value Facebook.Facebook_1.4.0.9_x64__8xx8rvfyw5nnt. We need this value in the next step to actually remove the app for good.

remove-appxpackage Facebook.Facebook_1.4.0.9_x64__8xx8rvfyw5nnt

And that’s it. The Facebook app has now been successfully and completely removed from the system. If we now look for this app in the Windows Store again, it is ready for installation again.

Problem solved!