Mac Purger: macOS Cleanup

The problem

A Mac fills up and macOS will not tell you with what. "System Data" swells to tens of gigabytes, one-click cleaners delete without saying what, and the honest advice — go through ~/Library by hand — is advice almost nobody can act on. Meanwhile the well-known cleaners want a subscription, every year, forever.

Buy once. Clean as often as you like.

Mac Purger is a one-time purchase. No subscription, no licence server, no yearly renewal, no limit on how many times you clean or how much you free. Pay once, keep it.

And it is a real Mac application. It opens, scans and cleans entirely on its own — no assistant, no account, no internet connection. The included skill adds a second layer for people who want it: Claude reads the scan, makes the judgement calls, and prepares a cleanup for you to approve, or runs it unattended on a schedule. Useful, and completely optional.

What it does

• Scans caches, logs, app leftovers, old installers, screen recordings and iOS backups, and grades every item Safe, Review or Careful.
• Explains each finding: what created it, where it lives, what breaks if it goes, and whether it comes back on its own.
• Checks what starts itself: login items, launch daemons, browser extensions, configuration profiles, and known adware and stealer families.
• Says plainly what cannot be reclaimed, including why macOS itself cannot be made smaller.
• Exports any view as text you can paste into a chat assistant, and every uncertain item has an "Ask AI" button.
• English and Swedish, switchable mid-result.

Why it is safe

Removals go to the Trash, so anything can be put back, and every run writes a receipt listing each path. A protection layer re-validates every path immediately before it is touched; 63 automated tests cover it, including a real deletion end to end. The sealed system volume is never touched. Nothing is pre-selected except items that rebuild themselves with no visible loss.

The source is included

The complete Swift source comes with the purchase, and the licence lets you change it: strip features, add your own cleaning rules, translate it, rebuild it. Your copy is yours. You may not resell or redistribute it.

Frameworks & tools

Native Swift and SwiftUI — a universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 13 Ventura or later, no dependencies and no runtime to install. Builds with Apple's Command Line Tools alone.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Asking a model to clean your Mac gets you rm -rf built on guesses about paths it cannot see. This ships a real application that does the looking, and confines the model to the part it is genuinely good at: reading the findings and deciding what is worth keeping.

Use cases

• Reclaim space on a Mac that is down to its last few gigabytes.
• Find out what "System Data" actually consists of on your machine.
• Find what an application left behind after you removed it.
• Check whether something unwanted is starting itself at login.
• Keep a Mac tidy automatically with a weekly scheduled cleanup.

Known limitations

macOS 13 or later only. Full Disk Access is needed to see screen recordings and other apps' containers. The app is code-signed but not notarised, so the first launch needs right-click then Open. It does not uninstall applications: the ones people most want gone are owned by root, and removing those needs a helper process running as root, which this tool deliberately will not install. Remove apps from Launchpad or Finder, then let Mac Purger find the leftovers.