Do older releases of MATLAB need to be uninstalled to install a newer release of MATLAB?

Do older releases of MATLAB need to be uninstalled to install a newer release of MATLAB?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

It is not necessary to uninstall older releases of MATLAB to install a new release of MATLAB. The default MATLAB installation path includes the name of the release, so each release of MATLAB installs into a unique folder to prevent different releases of MATLAB from interfering with each other. You can have as many releases of MATLAB on a single machine as necessary.

Furthermore, multiple releases of MATLAB installed on the same machine (and in the same user account, for user-based licenses) do not count as separate activations of MATLAB. No matter how many instances of MATLAB are installed on a machine in the same user account, from a licensing perspective this still counts as a single seat of MATLAB.

If you would still like to uninstall older releases of MATLAB for the purposes of recovering drive space, refer to the MATLAB documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/install/ug/uninstall-mathworks-products.html

[Steven Lord]

So if I continue to install every new version, my computer will have dozens of Matlab versions???

If you don't uninstall the older versions, yes.

Why not include an unistall old version option in the update process???

I believe a lot of users want to double-check that their existing code works in the newer version before uninstalling the older version. That way if there is a change or a bug that prevents them from adopting the newer version they can continue using the older version until they've reacted to the change or the bug has been fixed.

From a more software development perspective, the Single Responsibility of the Installer is to install the software. Uninstalling the software is the Single Responsibility of the Uninstaller. You wouldn't expect the Uninstaller to ask "Do you also want to install the newest release of the software?" would you?