CleanMyMac reputation question

. So I bet it was the case earlier, as my “assumption” of the OS doing so at 3 am should come from somewhere. In OS 10.8, or so, perhaps?

That stopped a lot earlier than that. 10.4 or so IIRC. Even then, if your Mac wasn’t running at 3 am it would simply run the scripts next time the Mac was run. A total non-issue and that way for years.

it cleans temporary files, apps localisations (I'll probably never use any app in, say, Norwegian), photos libraries, Mail attachments, iOS obsolete upgrades, iTunes damaged downloads and trashes (I'm guessing it includes trashes the Finder doesn't see, like others user's on different startup volumes). I also think it clears caches.

And this is where the fun starts: a number of apps will not run if you remove the localisations, cleaning photo libraries can - and often does - lead to significant dataloss, especially in the hands of inexperienced users - and database corruption, the Finder sees all the trashes except ones that are app specific, for instance, in a photo manager but then these can only be emptied by the app, not any other app. It should not ever empty the trash in other users accounts as that data is private to them, and I doubt it can, and clearing caches is the "repair permissions" du jour: a nice piece of utterly pointless hoodoo, that can be achieved effortlessly and for free by a simple safe-mode restart.

Anic264b wrote:

So I bet it was the case earlier, as my “assumption” of the OS doing so at 3 am should come from somewhere. In OS 10.8, or so, perhaps? Well, I'm not up to date, usually keeping earlier versions of the OS…

I actually recently jumped from 10.11 to 10.14; always new things to learn…

I don’t remember when Apple changed this. I’m pretty sure it dates back to 10.8 or perhaps earlier. I’m sure it is related to when they started selling mainly notebook machines that are often sleeping with the lid closed.

But for other apps, having a centralised way to update is nice. I'd have to use all apps frequently to update them otherwise (nothing annoys me more than waiting for an app to update when I want to use it; my Internet connexion is famously slow here).

What’s the attraction in having all apps updated anyway? That seems risky. I know one app, that I won’t mention, recently released an update and changed from a free app to a paid subscription. If you just update everything without checking first, you could have serious problems.

The colour wheel indicates something's “not normal”; in my case, I know what's not usual: I'm using a 2008 Mac Pro (still “fully” functional, and recently updated (RAM, USB 3.0 and SSD)) and a lot of apps running at the same time.

The beach ball cursor means an app has stopped responding to the system. The most likely cause of this is a buggy app. But if the problem happens to more than one app at a time, it could be a more systemic problem. For example, an older machine with limited RAM and a mechanical hard drive running a modern version of macOS will likely beach ball quite a bit. Modern versions of macOS expect lots of RAM, use all of said RAM, and expect to have a fast SSD to pick up the slack with virtual memory. If you have lots of RAM and an SSD on a 2008 Mac Pro, you should not be seeing beach balls.

I 100% agree with you: ads should not exist, and if CMM uses them, that's a bad point.

That’s not what I said. Most people don’t mind ads every now and then. Even those spooky personalized ads actually are something one might be interested in. I’m talking about truly blanketing parts of the internet.

Just for the record (so we know what cleaning CMM does), it cleans temporary files, apps localisations (I'll probably never use any app in, say, Norwegian), photos libraries, Mail attachments, iOS obsolete upgrades, iTunes damaged downloads and trashes (I'm guessing it includes trashes the Finder doesn't see, like others user's on different startup volumes). I also think it clears caches.

You don’t want a 3rd party app doing any of that stuff.

1) There is no need to “clean” temporary files. The system will do that when it restarts. If you start deleting temporary files at other times, the system could still be using them. That could lead to, I don’t know, beach balls?

2) You definitely don’t want to “clean” app localizations. That will corrupt the app and invalidate the signature. A properly designed app should be checking its own signature and would fail to run if you deleted localizations. You would only save a few KB of data, and depending on file system allocations, maybe nothing at all. Apple publicly said at the WWDC this year that unsigned apps will not run by default in future versions of macOS.

3) Photos and Mail. You most definitely never want some 3rd party app modifying files in apps like Photos or Mail that maintain databases with index files. That is a guaranteed corruption and loss of data.

4) Caches are designed to speed up your system. If you are deleting them, that could cause, again, beach balls.

Yes avoid it. It's at best scamware, at normal it's going to interfere with the OS, at worst it will gunk up your mac.

The primary reason is the software is completely worthless. It serves no purpose. macOS doesn't need any cleaning, optimizing, protecting, or any type of maintenance for that matter.

+1

I think the phrase "pointless hoodoo" describes CMM to a T.