Stay Away From Advanced Mac Cleaner
Shown below, once tricked into installing Advanced Mac Cleaner (which does nothing useful as far as I can tell), you’ll be harassed many times daily to pay up. This is done via a LaunchAgent whose purpose is to harass you until you pay up.
Indeed, the mode of installation is to trick and annoy users into installing it by scare tactics (“your mac has 383 serious problems, click here to fix it up real nice”, or similar fear tactics).
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But here is the real shocker (well, maybe not): Google promotes Advanced Mac Cleaner, and Apple allows it into the iTunes store! Shame on both companies.
As far as I can tell, the product in the Google ad and the Mac App Store is actually a different app called Dr. Cleaner. However, its reviews do not look encouraging, and its claims about optimizing memory sound suspicious.
CleanMyMac is a non-scammy app in this genre, but even there I think you need to be careful. The premise is that the app helps you delete files that you don’t understand, but then how can you be sure the app knows what it’s doing? In practice, I’ve seen lots of breakage caused by using these apps.
Previously: MacKeeper.
Update (2018-05-03): Dave Nanian:
If you’re using CleanMyMac, please note that it disables our scheduled copies when it runs. You should set it to not delete the “com.shirtpocket…” Launch Daemons.
Update (2018-05-04): Roustem Karimov:
I remember when CleanMyMac used to delete 1Password folders along with all user data in them. Not sure if it still does it
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I have used Mac Cleaner and I think they are a scam. I think they infect your computer as well as constantly creating popup scare tactics. It's all SELL SELL SELL with them. In my mind, they are WORSE than a virus and when you speak to them over the phone, they are so rude! I've given them the benefit of the doubt and they messed up my Mac -- it took AppleCare a long time to get rid of it completely. Don't use them. You might as well infect your computer with a virus -- it's the same thing.
