Cleaner Guru
Is the lifetime price worth it?
iPhone XR, iOS 16
Question marked as
tatmor wrote:
Can I please ask how you maintain your Mac if you don’t use a cleaner?
With multiple parallel and routine backups, and without installing add-on cleaners or add-on anti-malware apps or add-on commercial VPN apps.
macOS does pretty well maintaining itself, and the built-in anti-malware does well against what’s around, but then I don’t go looking for stuff in torrents or for cracked apps or such.
Some add-on anti-malware and some cleaners are themselves basically indistinguishable from malware. One of the better known security add-ons was caught selling personally-identified web browsing and web purchasing info, and add-on VPN apps are perfectly positioned to capture that same personally-identified info while badly solving a security problem that hasn’t existed for a decade or so. The vendors of some cleaner apps have been sued for their shenanigans.
The app migration that happens during setup and from backups is useful if I want to start over too, as well. I can migrate just what is needed (such as files and documents), and maybe not apps or settings if some app has gotten particularly pernicious. But I’ve only rarely needed that path.
Add-ons have been as much a source of trouble and performance degradation or scammy popups or such around here as providing their users with any benefits.
Outside of maybe end-point security where applicable, I generally don’t recommend these add-ons.
