Note that if it is possible to simply inspect the pinned apps policy and just remove defaults if that policy is not empty, then that might be a much easier way to achieve the same thing. All admins would have to do then would pin at least one app, which is usually the case.

OK, so the ask is either:

a) A policy to remove specific defaults (possibly fragile because we may add/change defaults whenever we want)

or

b) If PinnedLauncherApps policy is present, don't add any defaults (note that I don't know how defaults are specified - it's possible that they are populated during profile initialization so for pre-existing profiles we may not know whether a given icon is user-added or added by default, so we might only be able to do this option when the policy is set at the time the user first signs in).

Currently default pinned apps are hard-coded as a default value for syncable list pref: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/ui/ash/chrome_launcher_prefs.cc?rcl=9c1d91c2ce388ffd5bfb0c005cd1c9f7016c7e3a&l=42
There is a code that runs on First Run. Currently it joins kPinnedLauncherApps and kPolicyPinnedLauncherApps pref lists. We can change that code so that it would look if kPinnedLauncherApps has default value, and treat it as empty in that case.

That all applies to First run though, so there will be no changes for existing users.

I use my chromebooks as lenders at my library.  The blocked apps with the app icons still appearing confuses our patrons.

Other an enterprise customer has requested the same FR.
Case#: 15790232

Let's try to raise it a little to P2? As there are more and more customers are interested.

David: So we want to go with b) from comment #2?

Still nothing changed in recent versions, atwilson, dskaram: there are customer who are still interested and waiting for this FR, e.g. b) implementation of #2

Reassigning to marcus to prioritize this work.

This is more a bug with the underlying sync / enterprise / policy logic, not really with the UI itself.