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How to uninstall CleanMyMac completely

Dragging it to the Trash leaves the background helper running. This is how to find the rest — by searching for it, rather than trusting a list of paths that goes stale.

Last updated August 29, 2026 · by the RAMKeeper team

Cleaner suites install more than an app bundle. They typically add a privileged helper tool and one or more launch agents so they can run in the background and act with elevated permissions. Those survive a trip to the Trash, which is why people report the app "still being there" after they removed it.

Rather than give you a list of file paths — which differs by version and goes out of date — this walks through finding the leftovers on your own machine. The same method works for any Mac app.

Step 1: use the app's own uninstaller if it has one

Open the app and look in its application menu (the one with its name, next to ) for an Uninstall item, and check its preferences too. A vendor's own uninstaller knows about its own helper tools, so when one exists it is the cleanest route and the rest of this page becomes a verification pass rather than the main job.

Quit the app fully before continuing — including any menu-bar icon it leaves behind.

Step 2: remove the application

Drag it from /Applications to the Trash, or right-click → Move to Trash. You may be asked for your password; that is the helper tool being removed with it, which is what you want.

Step 3: find what it left behind

macOS apps keep their support files in a small, fixed set of locations. All eight of these exist on every Mac:

The quick way: search all of them at once

Open Terminal and run this, which lists anything matching the vendor or product name:

for d in ~/Library/Application\ Support ~/Library/Caches ~/Library/Preferences \
         ~/Library/LaunchAgents /Library/LaunchAgents /Library/LaunchDaemons \
         /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools /Library/Application\ Support; do
  find "$d" -maxdepth 1 -iname "*cleanmymac*" -o -maxdepth 1 -iname "*macpaw*" 2>/dev/null
done

Read the output before deleting anything. This only lists; it does not remove. Search for both the product name and the vendor name — files are often named after one and not the other.

If you prefer to click rather than type: in Finder, press Shift-Command-G and paste each path from the table above, then look through it by eye. The ~/Library folder is hidden by default, which is why Go to Folder is easier than browsing.

Do not miss the background items

This is the step people skip. To see what is actually still loaded and running:

launchctl list | grep -iE "cleanmymac|macpaw"

Anything that comes back is still active. The matching .plist will be in one of the LaunchAgents or LaunchDaemons folders above. Remove the .plist, then log out and back in (or restart) so the entry is actually unloaded.

For reference, the same command with no filter is how you audit every third-party background item on your Mac — worth running once even if you are not uninstalling anything:

launchctl list | awk 'NR>1 && $3 !~ /^com\.apple\./ {print $3}'

Step 4: check System Settings

Go to System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. Remove any entry still listed there. Some suites also install a Finder extension or a Spotlight importer, which show up in the same place.

Step 5: empty the Trash and restart

A restart is the reliable way to confirm nothing reloads. If a menu-bar icon or a background process comes back after restarting, something is still in a LaunchAgents or LaunchDaemons folder — go back to step 3.

Two things worth knowing before you reinstall anything

• Do not use one cleaner to remove another. You end up with two sets of privileged helpers instead of one, and you still have to do the steps above eventually.
• If the memory features were why you installed it, they were the weakest part of the bundle. We went through what each "free up RAM" technique actually does, with measurements from a real machine, in do Mac memory cleaners actually work?