How to delete safely Clean My Mac on my M2 Studio - yikes macpaw is on my machine!!!!

If you do a search, the entire first page of responses shows several different "Install and use OUR removal tool to remove THEIRs" articles-- very frustrating.

On this previous discussion, cactusfred posted a revised procedure including WHERE to look for the all the parts:

How do I remove Clean My Mac from my comp… - Apple Community

... and if you look at other postings there, you will see John Galt's extreme suggestion that you re-install, a suggestion from someone purporting to be MacPaw support telling you to use the built-in [flawed, incomplete] self-removal procedure they have available online,

... and posts from others complaining about it all.

CleanMyMac's uninstallation instructions will remove it, albeit with less than complete effectiveness:

https://cleanmymac.com/how-to-uninstall-cleanmymac

To remove it completely, you will need to manually inspect each of the following folders for a file that exists for the sole apparent purpose of determining that you installed it at one time:

~/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

/Library/LaunchAgents

The file name(s) will be evident. It seems CMM leaves them behind as placeholders in the event you were to install it again.

You probably have to boot "Safe Mode" to remove the file: Use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support

Undoing the effects of actually having used "CleanMyMac" — or any other similarly ill-conceived product for that matter — is a completely different question. Those apps are destructive in nature, and there is no "undo" from the potentially catastrophic results of actually using them (other than erasing the Mac and restoring a Time Machine backup created prior to installing them — which is how I recover after observing that destruction).

Hi John - I came across your profile and many replies around CMM this morning and having read 50 or so posts in the community on the not wise use of that app for any reason I have not yet read much about WHY it is so disliked specifically. Below is a post I made on another question asking same question so just doing a copy paste to this more recent question hoping for some clarification. I've used CMM for just under a year and no issues and didn't really realize it was so "dangerous" it seems. Thanks in advance for any reply you can provide.

Why wouldn't an app like this come in useful? Of course some of the actions it performs macOS has built in (usually not as pretty to look at) but there are others that macOS does not have (but can get in another free / paid app that may or may not be deemed terrible for you mac). Mostly though having a suite of tools which can be performed all at once and even on a scheduler is very useful.

I bought a year subscription of CleamMyMac X 11 months ago because my iMac17,1 running macos monterey which I've had since it was new was running like it was full of syrup. Did some google searchs and found the program bought it and ran it and 30 minutes after doing the first google search it was like I just took the mac out of the box. I run a full scan once or twice a month and have it monitoring and usually few times a day take a recomendation from the monitoring and is almost always to free up ram (I use Chrome and usually have 3 groups of tabs running each one have 10-20 tabs in it.) My total ram is only 8GB installed with room for 8 GB more. I really would like to add another 8 but the last time I looked a year ago it was basically the cost of my rent for the month. At the moment I have 2.39GB of ram "free" and of what is being used at the moment Chrome is taking 3.91GB of that. Everything else that is running and listed is around 100MB or less. I've looked at some Chromes extensions which help with resource consumption but have never found a "free" one which I can tell is helping at all. Anyone reads this and has a suggestion please reply.

Again I'll ask - why is CMM so terrible for the machine? Came across first post like that while doing a google search on a feature of CMM and fell down the apple support discussion board rabbit hole. Then found another 50 of them saying very basic negative things like "dont use it'll ruin your mac. might as well just throw it out the window now and go buy a new one" but not one poster I've read yet says WHY they are saying this. One post made a very good point - several members have said something like "Apple Support strongly advises against installing CMM" and to that this user replied back "Ok so why is the program in the Apple App Store is Apple is so against it?" I just checked it was actually there or should say still was there as I got my activation off their site from a google search. The app has 4.6 stars with 8700 reviews, is the Featured App in the app store section "Optimize Your Mac" (guessing that may be a paid spot so that doesn't matter as much but still would have to wonder why Apple would take their money and feature them if they were so anti CMM. Unless its a really sneaky way Apple figured out to build up their paid support and repair services....sneak a trojan horse of their own into the app store to kill 1 in 4 macs it gets installed on) and finally CMM holds the #3 spot in the Top Charts for Top Free Apps.

So again I ask....why all the Danger Will Robinson! Danger! from the support community?

Over the many years I have been reading Apple Mac Pro and MacBook Pro hardware forums, there have been multiple reports that CleanMyMac attempted to discard items that had names similar to a particular App, but were actually parts of the beating heart of MacOS. [on more recent MacOS, the system is locked so that is reported less often].

WHY THAT'S BAD: That tells us that CleanMyMac is "just guessing" and YOU could likely do better guessing than it does.

Cached files are on your Mac to speed it up. If you are running MacOS 10.9 Mavericks or later, the Memory Management Mantra is "Unused RAM is WASTED RAM". Your Mac will nearly fill ALL of RAM, by design. If an Application needs more RAM, Oldest cached files will be discarded to provide that RAM.

WHY THAT'S BAD: Caches speed up your Mac. Emptying caches slows it down. AND that tells you CleanMyMac is out of touch with the way your Mac was designed to work.

Readers have a lot of trouble un-installing CleanMyMac, and the maker-published procedure does NOT remove it all.

WHY THAT'S BAD: that unintended operation is a symptom of MALWARE.

Thanks Grant! Those are all within what I was thinking. I've always been skeptical of most appsand get really frustrated when you need an app for a specific reason and it says "free" and yea it's got like 57 awesome features but the one that I need it for the one I spent googling and installing and uninstalling a dozen different apps till I finally find it...that one app always has that one feature that requires a paid. subscription lol. The way it always seems to go. I really have not have had any issues with it - but am at this moment knocking on my wooden desk. It's a fairly basic app meaning I wish it could or would do more. It also seems like there are a couple versions of the same most recent X version based on if you bought it from them, some other super wallmart app store where you pay a monthly fee to the site and get access to like 200+ apps or if you get it from the Apple.

I thought it did do an ok job of giving the user a preview of what was going to be deleted - and there were certainly sections I stayed away from or suggestions I would say no to. In another similar post on here where I posted the same reply a part of one the member said something close to your "just guessing" comment which was that it seems like a lot of those who get burned by an app like CMM and have to do a complete reformat and reinstall and loose all sorts of important things because they used an app to essentially empty the trash are users who absolutely do not have the knowledge of what is or is not important or critical out of the list of items to delete CMM spits back out so of course they just click select all and delete. Why even present the name and location of these "bad files" as what typical computer user is going to know what is what.

And I really like the manta "Unused RAM is WASTED RAM" I never really thought of that way but it absolutely makes sense. I've got 8 GB of ram and about 5 or 6 always seem to be in use and the more ram being used the "faster" my computer should be or at least more efficient and smooth. So why am I always on this quest to squeeze that number down to like below 1GB?? It's sort of pathological now that I think about it. Reminds me of the early 2000's when I got my first 20GB hard drive to put in my IBM as a slave from seagate (prior to that I was using 50 and 100MB zip disks) and for whatever reason even though I wanted bigger and bigger storage I was always doing everything I could to reduce the amount of space that was being used. So bizarre.

Thanks again for your time!

The following from their support site may help: https://cleanmymac.com/how-to-uninstall-cleanmymac

Or get App Cleaner & Uninstaller, which is my goto cleanup app…

https://nektony.com/mac-app-cleaner

Mac Cleaner Pro...

https://nektony.com/mac-cleaner-pro