That’s how I mainly think of CleanMyMac 3, even though the developer, MacPaw, positions it as an all-purpose cleaning and maintenance app. And since most Mac developers (for reasons I can’t quite fathom) don’t provide their own, a third-party uninstaller utility is handy to have around. The uninstaller landscape has changed since then, but uninstallers are still as important as ever. I tested four of the most popular uninstaller apps available at that time, and found that although they all missed certain files, and some were easier to use than others, they seldom removed things they shouldn’t - and even when they did, it was rarely a serious problem. The two questions I was tasked with answering were “Are they safe?” and “Do they work?” Long story short, the answers were “Yes” and “Yes,“ with various qualifications (see “Mac utilities: Do uninstallers work?”). In 2010, Macworld asked me to write an article about uninstallers. Pretty soon, figuring out how to get rid of all that extra stuff when you wanted to stop using an app became a serious concern. An app might also add login or startup items, System Preferences panes, Dock icons, menu bar doohickies, and assorted background processes. Running an installer or opening an app for the first time might scatter files all over the place, particularly in various subfolders of /Library and ~/Library, such as Application Support, Caches, Frameworks, and LaunchAgents. As Mac OS X evolved, more and more apps needed to put more and more files in more and more places. Even for simple drag-to-install apps, there would nearly always be preference files, logs, and a few other items stored elsewhere.

Of course, it wasn’t quite true that apps were self-contained.

Done! Everything you needed was contained in the application package - a folder that looks and acts like a single file. To install them, you dragged them to your Applications folder, and to uninstall them, you dragged them from there to the Trash. In the early days of Mac OS X, Apple made a big deal about how most applications were, by design, self-contained. 1647: Focus-caused notification issues, site-specific browser examples, virtualizing Windows on M-series Macs.#1648: iPhone passcode thefts, Center Cam improves webcam eye contact, APFS Uncertainty Principle.#1649: More LastPass breach details and 1Password switch, macOS screen saver problem, tvOS 16.3.3 fixes Siri Remote bug.#1650: Cloud storage changes for Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive quirky printing problem.#1651: Dealing with leading zeroes in spreadsheet data, removing ad tracking from ckbk.

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