MacCleanup & Uninstall

Three of the five — Ditch, AppCleaner, and Pearcleaner — solve the same core problem: macOS’s own Trash-drag uninstall leaves caches, preferences, and support files scattered behind an app after you delete it. Ditch, a free open-source (MIT) app by Prabin Bhusal, is the only one built specifically around the notch — drag an app there and it finds and removes the leftover files, sending everything to Trash rather than deleting outright so a cleanup can be undone; at under 1MB of pure Swift, it’s also not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so the first launch needs a quarantine flag cleared manually. AppCleaner, a free direct download from FreeMacSoft with no purchase step anywhere in its flow, does the same drag-and-drop job with builds maintained back to macOS 10.6. Pearcleaner goes further still — full uninstall plus orphaned-file search, a Homebrew manager, and app “lipo” for stripping unused CPU architectures — but comes with two things worth knowing straight from its own developer, Alin Lupascu: active development has been on hold since late 2025 (a job change left him without a Mac to build releases from), and his own README warns that pearcleaner.com is an impersonator site — itsalin.com is the only one he claims.

GrandPerspective and OnyX solve different problems entirely, and neither uninstalls an app on its own. GrandPerspective just shows you where disk space actually went — every file drawn as a rectangle sized to its footprint, grouped by folder — built and still actively maintained by a single developer, Erwin Bonsma, since 2005; it’s free and open source via SourceForge, or a literal same-app $2.99 copy on the Mac App Store that the developer says just covers Apple’s developer-program fee. OnyX is the broadest tool here by far: system-file verification, cache clearing, app uninstalling, index rebuilding, and access to hidden Finder/Dock/Safari preferences in one free, donation-supported utility from France’s Titanium Software, which has maintained it since 2003. The one thing to get right with OnyX specifically: it ships a separate build matched to each macOS version, and using one built for the wrong OS isn’t supported.