Hi, thanks for reporting this, could you please provide more information about that problem (e.g. app name, policy example, logs, etc.).

Hi. It happens to all apps on the shelf. You can add new apps through policy but not remove them. The user have to unpin the app manually. I have tried to block the app through user policy. When i block the app it dont work anymore but the icon have to be removed manually. 

I got an answer from Google Cloud Support:

Thank you for contacting Google Cloud Support. I understand that you would like to remove pinned apps for Chrome OS users via policy.

I know how important it is to have apps configured properly, and I’ll be glad to help with this. In case you would like to discuss the issue over the phone, let me know what would be the best phone number and time to call. Currently, there is an option to pin apps to the shelf via policy but not to unpin them. Keep in mind that if users need to unpin apps and they are not pinned via policy, they can remove them from the shelf by right-clicking them and selecting “Unpin”. If users don’t have the option to unpin an app that was previously pinned via policy, make sure that the policies are updated by navigating to chrome://policy and reloading the policies.

If unpinning the apps manually is not an option for your users, you can either block apps or remove the profile every time they sign out. For details about blocking apps, you can visit the following Help Center article https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6177447#configure. For details about making user profiles ephemeral, you can visit the following article https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/1375678#eraseuserinfo. Even though there currently isn’t an option to remove pinned apps via policy, I think it would be a good idea to have it available in the future, and I’d appreciate it if you could submit any suggestions you have for this to the Chromium team via the following page: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list. To use the page, you can click the New issue button and submit your suggestions to the team.

I’ll keep the case open for the next three business days. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to reply and I'll be happy to help.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding the requester to the cc list.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Adding some chrome/browser/ui/ash/launcher/OWNERS. After skimming through the code, it's unclear why removals from the policy aren't applied, since the policy is dynamically updatable. Or was there a reason to be on safe side and to keep these items?

It could just be an oversight? I haven't been in this code in a while, but IIRC it's a bit more complicated than it seems at first.

xiyuan@, khmel@, are you aware of anyone who has been working on this code recently and might be able to pick it up?

IIRC we allow only set pin by policy (user cannot unpin). But we don't force app be unpinned. We also automatically hide pin in case app is uninstalled. Probably we may want to hide pin for blocked apps as well.

We are blocking all apps except apps that are whitelisted. 
But want to remove some whitelisted apps from shelf.