this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Tricky situation. False positives happen and a significant amount of what AppCleaner picks up is technically “user data”.
If Apple just built what AppCleaner does directly into macOS, we wouldn’t have to worry about anything like that at all. In the meantime, we have to turn to a third party to help with something as essential as uninstalling an app completely.
That’s my point. AppCleaner isn’t magic. It’s killing off some known flotsam and making, essentially, educated guesses. It occasionally gets it wrong. Less frequently with suggesting removal of something it shouldn’t have and more often by not catching “everything”.
Apple doesn’t want to be involved with guessing games and run into the potential of getting it wrong. Microsoft doesn’t do it with Windows and none of major Linux distributions that I’m familiar with do it, under default conditions, either.
Whatever educated guesses it’s making are pretty damn good then.
As a habit, I always give a quick scroll through all the files AppCleaner finds when I ask it to delete something and not once has it selected anything irrelevant. Been using it for many years now and the app’s performance has just been bulletproof for me in all that time.
If it works as well as it has for me, I would rather it go that extra mile and delete whatever crap it needs to delete rather than leaving vestigial files on my computer for apps I don’t want anymore.