Comment by Telemakhos 2 days ago
Is this actually true? I thought Chess.app was, from OSX Lion (prior to Mavericks) yea unto the present, protected from deletion from the Applications folder as somehow intrinsically important to the system. It's apparently load-bearing, not just a holdover from NeXTSTEP but an integral element that the OS must defend at all costs to ensure System Integrity.
It's absolutely not true on Lion or on Mavericks. You can just delete Chess. I know because I've done it. I've been using the system for five years.
On Lion—or, well, at least on Mavericks, but I'm assuming this is all Apple did starting in Lion—there is literally just a list of Appications in the Finder binary that, should you try to delete them, Finder will pop up a message stopping you. You can hex edit the Finder binary and the message will go away for the hex-edited app.
(Newer versions of macOS have signed system volume stuff, I'm not talking about that! This was introduced right around the time I nope'd out and built my current Mavericks computer.)
It's because its in the signed system volume. You cannot modify the system volume in any way. macOS will do all sorts of crazy things to portray that volume as just like the old filesystem, but ultimately there are hard limits. Deleting apps in that volume is one of them it seems.