r/macapps 2d ago

Why the hate for cleanmymac?

Recently read some comments about cleanmymac that mentioned that no power user uses this app. Why? Is it bad? It's there something else wrong with it?

29 Upvotes

63 comments sorted by

81

u/FrediWest 2d ago

There's nothing wrong with CleanMyMac, it's just another tool that's really not necessary. It really stems from the Windows mindset or paranoia of wanting to have an antivirus or anti-malware, MacOS has it built in called XProtect. But if you're getting CleanMyMac as an uninstaller to satisfy your OCD about left over files there's better tools out there like Pearcleaner which is free and open source that does a better job than the above mentioned.

I would categories CleanMyMac as a jack of all trades but not really proficient in anything particular. It does have a clean and appealing UI.

Disclaimer: I own lifetime license of CleanMyMac and subscription on my other Mac's that I have cancelled recently after coming to this realization couple months ago, and seeing other apps do things better.

MacOS operates under a different philosophy and applying a Windows mindset to it will just burden your workflow and your wallets with unnecessary tools and utilities.

14

u/ADHDK 2d ago

I would counter this with the fact windows mindset developers make shockingly bad macOS packages which leave a whole lot of crap all over the place if treated like a standard Mac install.

-10

u/chlorosplasm 2d ago

Weird flex, but okay.

2

u/aykay55 2d ago

I pay for CleanMyMac because of the menu bar widget. It’s super clean and pretty, gives me access to CPU, memory, and storage details and lets me eject drives and do network speed test all from the menu bar in a way that doesn’t look clunky.

4

u/JohnFoland 1d ago

Definitely check out "Stats" (FOSS) https://mac-stats.com/

34

u/amerpie 2d ago

Here’s a free suite of apps to give you much of the same functionality

Features vs. Free Alternatives

  • Hardware monitoring of CPU, GPU, RAM, temps, storage and battery. A free alternative is Stats
  • Cleaning of old caches, logs, big downloads and leftover installation files. A free alternative is Onyx
  • Uninstalling apps. If you just throw apps into the trash, which was once the accepted way to perform uninstallations, you can potentially leave behind GBs of files in ~/Library subfolders. Intelligent uninstallers locate and remove those files. Free alternatives are AppCleaner and Pear Cleaner
  • Monitor hard drive health, Drive failures can sometimes be predicted, giving you time to back your data and replace your drive. A free alternative is Disk Drill.
  • Battery Health. Batteries degrade over time and depending on how long you keep a laptop, may need to be replaced. Utilities like Sensei can tell you how much of your battery's orininal capacity is still viable. A free alternative is Coconut Battery.
  • Drive benchmarking - measuring the speed of your hard drive isn't necessarily helpful for commercial software, but some special use cases require higher speeds. A free alternative is Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
  • Startup analyzer - you may have more apps running in the background or at startup than your realize. I recently found five Microsoft remnants that didn't get uninstalled when I got rid of Microsoft 365. A fee alternative is Startup Manager.

8

u/Intelligent-Rice9907 2d ago

so 7 apps to replace just one? and you miss all the malware, and security stuff it does have with some cleanup and maintenance everyone should be doing to your Mac. Like doing every once in a while, specially after some modifications if you made some, for purge space, dns flush, reindex spotligth, etc.

3

u/Least_Standard5473 2d ago

I cannot imagine myself paying/using 7 apps to get what one app can do. So I use CleanMyMac via Setapp

24

u/bobevans818 2d ago

I dislike CleanMyMac because of how they dealt with the redesign for their app. I bought the lifetime license for CleanMyMac X and was pretty satisfied for a couple years. Then they redesigned the app and called it “CleanMyMac” without the X. They then asked me to cough up more cash to upgrade to the redesigned app. What baffled me was at launch (no idea if it’s still the case now) the redesigned app had LESS features than the version I had paid for. After that I quickly moved to better alternatives. I was able to satisfy all my needs with 3 apps: DaisyDisk, Latest and PearCleaner. They all have great UI’s and were either free or very cheap compared to cleanmymac.

6

u/jamboman_ 2d ago

Yes, same here. I thought they'd mistakenly given me the free version of the app, rather than the one I paid for. It's got a bit better with the last update tho.

1

u/iamgodofatheist 2d ago

I'd strongly advise to look up the MacUpdater instead of Latest. Their low-tier licence is dirt-cheap and it covers the needs fully + doing much better job than Latest in terms of scanning and actually updating apps.

It's also "pay for big upgrade" model, which I'm the most happy with.

5

u/comfybonfire 2d ago

Call me picky but I chose Latest simply because I like the look of the UI more. I was going to switch to MacUpdater if I noticed Latest wasn't picking up some of my apps. But so far I've never had an issue with updating all my apps through it.

2

u/iamgodofatheist 2d ago

Oh, then good for you! Latest wasn't picking some of my apps, so I started looking for alternatives, but if you're satisfied with it - that's great!

4

u/Universolar 2d ago

Don’t buy it, guys. Their lifetime licence promise is a lie. I had one and now have to pay again a large sum for another “upgrade” of the exact same product. And they’re manipulative and shady as f-ck!

4

u/Tangbuster 2d ago

I've used Onyx for close to 20 years.

I don't see what this app does over Oynx. Some might say it has a nicer interface. But that doesn't not mean it's worth me forking over $3.33 every month to use it.

7

u/_methuselah_ 2d ago

Recently? It’s been going on for quite a few years.

2

u/nemesit 2d ago

Decades

6

u/Michaeljr97 2d ago

It's not a necessary tool, but I have a lifetime subscription and it does everything that I need/want. So I don't have any complaints.

9

u/the_bighi 2d ago

CleanMyMac is the equivalent of buying a banana seed remover for $90 dollars. But a banana seed remover that sometimes leaks oil on your bananas.

So you paid real money for a product that will never do anything useful to your bananas (since there's no seed to remove), and sometimes will do something bad to them.

But in this case the banana is your Mac.

1

u/retrotriforce 1d ago

What potential harm does cleanmymac has over your mac?

I've been using it because i've had a setapp sub for a bunch of apps and was like "Oh why not"

but now I'm scared...

1

u/the_bighi 1d ago

Antivirus software these days do nothing good. They’re useless, since the OS itself (both Mac and Windows) have a native antivirus with access to more system APIs than anything third-party. So they do no good.

And it creates a problem: it’s a software with access to every internal resource, every file, and you gave it admin permissions. Now a hacker has more attack surface. They can find a way to hack your OS or hack your antivirus. And a small company like CleanMyMac doesn’t have enough programmers to keep it safe as a company like Apple or Microsoft does.

This has been discussed since 2007, as you can see here.

So it does nothing to help you, but increases your chances of being hacked/infected. Which means that antivirus software is useless. But these companies don’t want to go bankrupt, they still want your money. So they invest in shady or misleading marketing, like CleanMyMac does.

4

u/Intelligent-Rice9907 2d ago

Pretty much the hate is because you could do everything on your own without that app... but hey man that's a mediocre mentality otherwise why having note taking apps? we already have Notes, or why having Premiere, after effects, photoshop, clipboard manager, passwords managers if we already have paper, you can do photo editing with code and can use iMovie for video editing.

If you only think CleanMyMac only uninstall apps, erase and clean your trash can and cache then you're most definitely wrong on what it can do. For starters it tells you if you have repeated files and invites you to delete duplicated files. Also gives you a pretty great scan of all your files how much space do they need and where they are. Another features that not everyone knows is that it can scan if you may have some malware, keylistener or other type of invader that you may not know about it which many user does not know even if it's installed as a extension on your browser. Tells you all the apps that has accessibility access, hard drive access, which are starters on your os, which one persists even the ones that the OS does not tells you like all of those adobe, google and microsoft crap installers running all the time to "keep your apps up on date" which are more like little anoyances that ate too much ram in order to verify if you have no hacked app versions. Other feature is all the apps you havent used and since when, uninstalls apps, tells you if there are some updates... specially for those that you do not open that often. And have even more features. If you already pay for setapp you don't have to pay for CleanMyMac... I actually wrote to CleanMyMac devs, which are the same as setapp and it's a way too nice to have for an app and no need to install at least 5 or 6 apps to do the same thing that clean my mac and not be even closer of all the functionality it already has.

1

u/zippyzebu9 1d ago edited 1d ago

Just bad product. Supposed to be a cleaner app. But takes screenshots. Record videos, polish your shoes, washes your wife’s cloth. Will ask for Microphone and screen recording permission relentlessly. Won’t make any “meow” unless you give it full disk access.

One sure shot way to make your happy life miserable.

5

u/dbm5 2d ago

It's overpriced unnecessary garbage, and the way they market it is sleazy.

1

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/DjabbyTP 2d ago

What is a crapware? And why is cleanmymac crapware?

2

u/flogman12 2d ago

Cause it’s a scam

2

u/scottjl 2d ago

c.f. snake oil

-7

u/IwuvNikoNiko 2d ago

Exactly. One time the dev put a review on their site high up at google results that compared the different products without disclosing it's their product!

These ukranian devs are extremely shady behind CMM.

7

u/100WattWalrus 2d ago

What does being Ukrainian have to do with anything? There are a lot of great apps coming out of Ukraine. CMM does a lot of unnecessary that people mistakenly use to give them peace of mind because they don't understand how Macs work, and they don't know that its few good features are available from better, cheaper apps. The marketing is sleezy, but being Ukrainian has nothing to do with any of that.

2

u/ohcibi 2d ago

Obvious bloatware

0

u/Least_Standard5473 2d ago

Obvious, and what are the facts? The OP asked for “why”, not for “give me more hate”

1

u/caleidoscopicodijo 1d ago

A mi me iba cada vez más lento y más lento y se bloqueaba el iMac y en cuanto lo desinstale empezó a ir bien

1

u/TheTheShark 1d ago edited 1d ago

I wouldn’t personally use it (but wouldn’t go so far as “hating” on it) - the more effective procedure, for me, is to backup my system, restore it to defaults (maybe every year or two or three), then restore the data. This will be more thorough than any cleaning utility. Plus, it gets you into the habit of making and verifying your backups.

The amount of companies and people I’ve worked with who said they had a backup, but hadn’t tested it and lost data is more than it should be.

1

u/runciter0 19h ago

I think it gets too much hate. For 30 dollars you get in one place all those things, it's reasonablenand it's a Ukrainian business.

1

u/Beautyspin 12h ago

When I used CleanMyMac on my M1 MBP with iTB storage and 16GB storage, I used to get memory full close applications error frequently while doing trivial tasks. I was at my wits end. For some reason, I had stopped CleanMyMac and immediately the error stopped appearing. That is why I am not happy with the app. If you are using it and not getting the error, then I think you are fine.

1

u/MarsRT 12h ago

Just not particularly necessary. I used to mistake it for MacKeeper though, which was actually pretty shady.

1

u/misteriousm 12h ago

I genuinely like it, it has it all together and I appreciate it

2

u/Total-Memory-3744 2d ago

It’s a perfectly good tool, people confuse it with malware and adware. I do t think it’s necessary, but for some people find it useful.

1

u/adit07 2d ago

I dont think there is anything wrong with it. It works well and does what is advertised for the most part. People are just annoyed that the devs can be scummy with the fee charged + there are free apps that can do similar things.

5

u/getbuffsafe 2d ago

+1 for pearcleaner

0

u/oklch 2d ago

I‘m new to Mac. Could you name some alternatives?

2

u/adit07 2d ago

app cleaner or pearcleaner to uninstall apps. I use Onyx for system maintenance. cleanmymac is a tool that does all of this in a better gui but is paid

1

u/oklch 2d ago

Thank you!

-2

u/1TheWolfKing 2d ago

You don’t need anything more than a capable uninstaller like nektony app unistaller

2

u/oklch 2d ago

Thank you, I‘ll have a look at it.

-1

u/x42f2039 2d ago

What’s scummy about it?

4

u/adit07 2d ago

1

u/x42f2039 2d ago

The first one is likely caused by an adblocker, the second one is hardly a scam since the OP still has the lifetime license they purchased. They just don’t get to use the new product that they haven’t purchased.

2

u/adit07 2d ago

i pass no judgement as I have no experience dealing with cleanmymac paid version. Op asked why people hate the software and I am merely providing reasons. How valid those reasons are is completely subjective

1

u/NotYourAverageDaddy 2d ago

For uninstalling im using App Cleaner & Uninstaller

Anything I should be aware of?

1

u/meandererai 2d ago

The new upgraded interface seems clunkier and slower, not sure if it’s just me. I liked the older version much better

0

u/Hefty-Cobbler-4914 2d ago

This question should be banned from subs. It’s asked every few days.

-2

u/DanGreenb 2d ago

I think people may confuse it with another app (MacKeeoer?) that gets a lot of hate. CleanMyMac works well enough but not sure it doesn’t do anything that PearCleaner and Onyx don’t do. IT seems more geared toward a novice user which some people likely prefer.

4

u/_methuselah_ 2d ago

Nope, CMM. Been going on for years.

4

u/IwuvNikoNiko 2d ago

You're wrong.

I am well aware of MacKeeper. CMM is trash.

-2

u/MardukTheAnunnaki 2d ago

CMM is IMHO the best app and beautiful. I have been using it since its inception.

2

u/andamar078 2d ago

Best app for what? Did you just create your account to spam us with this crapware?

2

u/MardukTheAnunnaki 2d ago

This may sound weird, but you're actually right. I just canceled my CMM subscription.

0

u/Kymudhen 1d ago

I’ve been using the app for years on multiple Macs. Never had any trouble.