AppCleaner is a freeware utility for deleting software from your Mac.
“Uh?” you say. “I thought deleting software was easy. Just drag applications to the Trash, and they’re gone.”
Well, yeah. Sort of. Doing this does delete the application, but it often leaves behind sundry little files that the app itself created while you were using it. Preferences, caches, other bits and bobs. They very rarely take up any significant space on your disk, and won’t do any harm if you leave them there, but it’s just neater and tidier to delete them along with the app that put them there in the first place.
And that’s why it’s worth installing AppCleaner. Instead of dragging an application to the Trash, drag it to AppCleaner. It will hunt down all the cruft and let you delete everything in one go.
If there does happen to be some tiny file that you really want to keep, you can do that too, if you must. But most of the time, AppCleaner will automatically do all the tidying up that you don’t have time for.
(You’re reading the 24th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)
