diff --git a/ghost/admin/app/routes/application.js b/ghost/admin/app/routes/application.js
index deb99050c1..05086b3a78 100644
--- a/ghost/admin/app/routes/application.js
+++ b/ghost/admin/app/routes/application.js
@@ -5,7 +5,6 @@ import Route from '@ember/routing/route';
 import ShortcutsRoute from 'ghost-admin/mixins/shortcuts-route';
 import ctrlOrCmd from 'ghost-admin/utils/ctrl-or-cmd';
 import windowProxy from 'ghost-admin/utils/window-proxy';
-import {htmlSafe} from '@ember/string';
 import {
     isAjaxError,
     isNotFoundError,
@@ -53,7 +52,6 @@ export default Route.extend(ApplicationRouteMixin, ShortcutsRoute, {
         if (this.get('session.isAuthenticated')) {
             this.set('appLoadTransition', transition);
             transition.send('loadServerNotifications');
-            transition.send('checkForOutdatedDesktopApp');
 
             let featurePromise = this.get('feature').fetch();
             let settingsPromise = this.get('settings').fetch();
@@ -113,26 +111,6 @@ export default Route.extend(ApplicationRouteMixin, ShortcutsRoute, {
             }
         },
 
-        checkForOutdatedDesktopApp() {
-            // Check if the user is running an older version of Ghost Desktop
-            // that needs to be manually updated
-            // (yes, the desktop team is deeply ashamed of these lines 😢)
-            let ua = navigator && navigator.userAgent ? navigator.userAgent : null;
-
-            if (ua && ua.includes && ua.includes('ghost-desktop')) {
-                let updateCheck = /ghost-desktop\/0\.((5\.0)|((4|2)\.0)|((3\.)(0|1)))/;
-                let link = '<a href="https://dev.ghost.org/ghost-desktop-manual-update" target="_blank">click here</a>';
-                let msg = `Your version of Ghost Desktop needs to be manually updated. Please ${link} to get started.`;
-
-                if (updateCheck.test(ua)) {
-                    this.get('notifications').showAlert(htmlSafe(msg), {
-                        type: 'warn',
-                        key: 'desktop.manual.upgrade'
-                    });
-                }
-            }
-        },
-
         // noop default for unhandled save (used from shortcuts)
         save: K,
 
diff --git a/ghost/admin/tests/acceptance/ghost-desktop-test.js b/ghost/admin/tests/acceptance/ghost-desktop-test.js
deleted file mode 100644
index 14f2a18c59..0000000000
--- a/ghost/admin/tests/acceptance/ghost-desktop-test.js
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,72 +0,0 @@
-import destroyApp from '../helpers/destroy-app';
-import startApp from '../helpers/start-app';
-import {afterEach, beforeEach, describe, it} from 'mocha';
-import {authenticateSession} from 'ghost-admin/tests/helpers/ember-simple-auth';
-import {expect} from 'chai';
-
-const originalAgent = window.navigator.userAgent;
-
-const setUserAgent = function (userAgent) {
-    let userAgentProp = {
-        get() {
-            return userAgent;
-        },
-        configurable: true
-    };
-
-    try {
-        Object.defineProperty(window.navigator, 'userAgent', userAgentProp);
-    } catch (e) {
-        window.navigator = Object.create(window.navigator, {
-            userAgent: userAgentProp
-        });
-    }
-};
-
-const restoreUserAgent = function () {
-    setUserAgent(originalAgent);
-};
-
-describe('Acceptance: Ghost Desktop', function () {
-    let application;
-
-    beforeEach(function () {
-        application = startApp();
-    });
-
-    afterEach(function () {
-        destroyApp(application);
-    });
-
-    describe('update alerts for broken versions', function () {
-        beforeEach(function () {
-            let role = server.create('role', {name: 'Administrator'});
-            server.create('user', {roles: [role]});
-
-            return authenticateSession(application);
-        });
-
-        afterEach(function () {
-            restoreUserAgent();
-        });
-
-        it('displays alert for broken version', async function () {
-            setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) ghost-desktop/0.4.0 Chrome/51.0.2704.84 Electron/1.2.2 Safari/537.36');
-
-            await visit('/');
-
-            // has an alert with matching text
-            expect(find('.gh-alert-blue').length, 'number of warning alerts').to.equal(1);
-            expect(find('.gh-alert-blue').text().trim(), 'alert text').to.match(/Your version of Ghost Desktop needs to be manually updated/);
-        });
-
-        it('doesn\'t display alert for working version', async function () {
-            setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) ghost-desktop/0.5.1 Chrome/51.0.2704.84 Electron/1.2.2 Safari/537.36');
-
-            await visit('/');
-
-            // no alerts
-            expect(find('.gh-alert').length, 'number of alerts').to.equal(0);
-        });
-    });
-});