an AppCleaner alternative

what AppCleaner already does, and does well

an app writes far beyond its own bundle, and dragging the bundle to the Trash leaves the rest behind. AppCleaner has solved that for nearly twenty years, for nothing, in one window. if that is the whole of your problem, you can stop reading here — nothing further down beats it at the job it does.

two things this page used to claim as differences are not differences. AppCleaner moves what it removes to the Trash rather than erasing it, exactly as hop does, and its list of installed apps shows their sizes, exactly as hop's does. a comparison that quietly keeps those in its own column is one you should not trust, including when we are the ones making it.

AppCleaner is not even the only free one: Pearcleaner and PureMac are newer, open source and do the same job. this corner of the Mac is unusually well served, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose you.

the operation itself, with no product standing in front of it, is written up separately. uninstall an app with its leftovers

what macOS gives you for removing an app

the trash takes the bundle and stops there

Apple's own instructions are short: quit the app, drag it to the Trash, empty the Trash. the same page says that if the app came with an uninstaller of its own, that is the best way to remove it along with login items, extensions and data it stored elsewhere.

read that the other way round and you have the shape of the gap: when the vendor shipped no uninstaller — which is most of the time — the drag is everything macOS offers, and everything outside the bundle stays where it is. that is documented behaviour, not a gap anyone invented to sell you something.

Apple describes both routes and names the bundled uninstaller as the better one, precisely because it reaches the files the drag does not. delete or uninstall apps on Mac — Apple Support

pkgutil --forget does not delete anything

a good half of the uninstall guides online offer «pkgutil --forget com.vendor.app» as the command-line way to remove an app. it is not one. checked on macOS 26.6.2 on 10 September 2026, the manual page says it in a single line: «Discard all receipt data about package-id, but do not touch the installed files».

it throws away the installer's receipt, so a reinstall behaves as though the package had never been there, and every file it put on the disk stays exactly where it was. there is no uninstall command in macOS at all — the Terminal route for this job does not exist.

if what sent you here was a storage bar you could not account for, that has a page of its own. find out what system data is using

where an app actually writes

about thirty places, in practice: preferences, caches, application support, a sandbox container, saved state, logs, launch agents, plug-ins, receipts. most sit in one of the Library folders, and Apple documents which is meant for what.

the split between caches, preferences and support files is not a convention apps invented — it is the layout Apple asks developers to follow. macOS library directory details — Apple Developer

the folder is rarely named after the app

this is what makes doing it by hand harder than it sounds: searching for the bundle identifier finds the sandbox containers, because those are named after it, and misses the rest.

on the Mac this page was written on, «~/Library/Application Support» holds folders called Adobe, Blizzard, Battle.net, Blue Jeans and BlueJeans — vendor names, product names, and in two cases the same company twice under different spellings. none of them contains a bundle identifier. the same Mac has 916 folders in «~/Library/Containers», which is the part a search does find, and the smaller part.

and some of it is not readable without permission

several of those locations sit behind the privacy controls macOS applies to every app, the Terminal included. without Full Disk Access, a tool looking for leftovers is not told «no» so much as shown a shorter list.

which folders sit behind that permission, and where it is granted, is documented by Apple. controlling app access to files in macOS — Apple Support

what the leftovers add up to, category by category on a live disk, is taken apart in a separate article. what the space a cleaner finds is made of

which of the two you actually need

if you remove an app every few weeks and want its leftovers to go with it, AppCleaner is enough. keep it. the removal is the same removal, it costs nothing, and swapping tools would buy you nothing.

the case for hop starts where the removal ends. the apps you are keeping are sitting on caches of their own, the installers you opened months ago are still in Downloads, and the apps you dragged away two years ago left data no uninstaller you run today knows to look for. that is a different job, and a tool that only removes apps will never do it.

if what you are really weighing this against is a paid maintenance suite rather than a free uninstaller, that comparison is elsewhere. hop and CleanMyMac

where AppCleaner is better than hop

one window, and nothing to learn

you drop an app on it, you look at a list, you confirm. no modules, no other tools asking for a moment of your attention, nothing to configure. hop's uninstall lives in a panel with seventeen other things in it, and if you never wanted the other seventeen, that is overhead rather than value. simplicity is a feature, and AppCleaner has more of it than we do.

small, old, and trusted for it

it is a few megabytes, it has been the answer on Mac forums since before Apple silicon existed, and in all that time nobody has had to warn anyone off it. that record cannot be argued into existence. hop is new: the code being open and MIT-licensed is evidence of a kind, but it is not two decades of people not being burned.

it runs on Macs hop will not

AppCleaner 3.6.8 covers macOS from Mojave through Tahoe. hop needs macOS 14 or newer. on a Mac that stopped getting updates a few years ago, only one of the two runs at all, and it is not ours.

both are distributed from their own sites rather than the App Store, which changes a few things worth knowing about. the App Store version versus the one from the site

what hop adds next to AppCleaner

the difference is scope, and it shows up after the removal rather than during it. the module that takes an app away also lists every app holding a cache, biggest first; installers left in Downloads, on the Desktop and in Documents; and the data of apps removed long ago by hand.

one detail on our side is worth naming, because it is the part people find out too late. whatever macOS refuses to hand over is named, with the reason, instead of quietly dropping out of the list — a shorter list looks like a cleaner Mac and is not one. the module also says what it leaves alone on purpose: inside a sandbox container the cache folder sits next to the app's real data, and only that app knows which half is disposable.

the full list of what the uninstall module looks at, and what it skips on purpose, is on its own page. the app uninstaller in hop

it is an uninstaller, not a cleaner

hop does not promise to speed up your Mac, free mysterious gigabytes or find problems you did not know you had. those belong to a genre of software that has earned its reputation honestly.

it removes an app and what it left behind, and tidies the same kinds of files elsewhere. that is the whole job — and the smaller version of the same restraint is exactly what AppCleaner is respected for.

when a removal does not go through

the apps that ship with macOS — Mail, Music, Notes, Maps and the rest — are protected by the system, and no uninstaller gets past that. neither will we, and a tool claiming otherwise is claiming to have turned a security feature off.

the ordinary failures are duller: the app is still running and its files are in use, it left a background helper that starts again, or it lives outside Applications.

the stubborn cases, and what to do in each, have a page to themselves. delete an app that will not delete

how to try it without deciding anything

1. grab hop: roughly 6 mb, nothing to sign up for, macOS 14 and up
2. open the uninstall module and look past the removal list at the caches, the installers and the data of apps that are already gone
3. remove something you have not opened in a year, then check the Trash to see exactly what went
4. if AppCleaner still suits you better in daily use, keep it — it costs nothing either, and this page has not been arguing that it should not

frequently asked questions

both are free — why switch?

you may well not need to. the removal is the same job done the same way. the reason to look is what sits around it: the caches of apps you are keeping, installers left in Downloads, the data of apps removed long ago, and seventeen other tools in one icon.

does AppCleaner delete files permanently?

no, and neither does hop. both move what they remove to the Trash, so a wrong tick costs a restore rather than a file. you empty the Trash yourself when you are sure.

is there a command to uninstall an app in macOS?

no. «pkgutil --forget» is often presented as one, but it only discards the installer's receipt and leaves every file in place — its manual page says so outright, checked on macOS 26.6.2.

will it make my Mac faster?

no, and we would rather not pretend. it frees space by removing apps, their leftovers and what other apps have cached; speed is a different problem.

can i remove an app already in the trash?

yes. hop still recognises it — the identifier is read from the bundle sitting there, or worked out from the leftovers — so a half-finished removal can be completed.

can i clear just the cache?

yes, for a single app, without touching anything else of its. the list is sorted biggest first, which is usually enough to find the one that matters.

does hop run on an older Mac?

macOS 14 and up. AppCleaner 3.6.8 goes back to Mojave, so on a Mac older than that hop is not an option and AppCleaner is.

the hop side of this

app uninstaller — remove an app together with what it left in about thirty places.