Pearcleaner For Mac

If you install and uninstall lots of apps, you’re going to need some way to get rid of the files they leave behind. Most apps create additional files outside of the Applications folder, and these are not normally removed when sending the app to the Trash.

Pearcleaner is an open-source tool that can help you with this. It searches for related files when an app is removed and gives you the option to delete them as well. It’s quite simple to use, but it does have some flaws at the moment.

There are a few ways to use the app. First, you can just open the main window, browse through your app collection, and uninstall them from there. Second, you can drop apps onto the Pearcleaner Dock icon. Lastly, the Sentinel feature can monitor your Trash folder for software and automatically start up the leftover remover.

Whichever way you choose to go about it, the process is very straightforward. You can inspect the files the app has identified and deselect the ones you would like to keep. There’s also a mini UI mode with a smaller desktop footprint.

Pearcleaner uses a combination of an app’s bundle ID and app name to find associated files. Unfortunately, this leads to some cases of mistaken identity. When uninstalling Logitech G HUB, it also attempted to remove GarageBand’s Application Support/Logic folder, and when uninstalling Text Case, files from a bunch of other apps were also selected.

There are other problems as well. It’s not possible to remove multiple apps at once, like with AppCleaner, leftover files aren’t ranked by confidence level, and dropping apps onto the Dock icon with mini UI mode activated fails to display their details properly.

For now, Pearcleaner has a few major issues, the biggest of which being its tendency to sometimes overreach when looking for related files to remove. If these problems are worked out, it could be an open-source alternative to AppCleaner, but you’re better off using the latter for now.