wtf is mclean?

MClean is a free, open source app for macOS that helps you reclaim disk space by clearing out junk files, fully uninstalling apps, and visualizing what is taking up room on your drive. It runs on macOS 13 and newer, works on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and the whole app is only about 11 MB. The Smart Scan feature checks ten categories at once, including system junk, app caches, files from AI tools like Ollama and LM Studio, Mail data, the Trash, large or old files, Xcode junk, and cache from Brew, Node, and Docker. Results are shown broken down by category and nothing is deleted automatically, you review and select what you want cleaned. Large or old files, meaning over 100 MB or older than a year, are never pre-selected for you. A feature called Space Lens scans your Home folder or any other folder and shows disk usage as a bubble map sized to actual bytes used. You can click into a bubble to explore a folder more deeply, use a breadcrumb trail to go back, and select items from a list to send to the Trash. For removing an app completely, MClean uses a ten layer matching system, checking things like the app's bundle ID, group identifiers, entitlements, and file metadata, to find every related file scattered across your Mac: preferences, caches, containers, launch agents, and logs. This is meant to remove an app in one pass without needing a separate uninstaller tool. There is also a feature that scans your Library folder for leftover files from apps you already deleted long ago, and an optional scheduled cleanup that runs in the background on a set interval. The developer states a few commitments: deleted files always go to the Trash rather than being permanently removed outright, the app collects no analytics or crash reports and makes no network calls, and it avoids alarming or exaggerated warnings. MClean needs Full Disk Access permission to reach certain protected areas of macOS, and the README states that without this permission, cleanup would miss around 70 percent of what it could otherwise find. Building the app yourself requires Xcode 16 or newer.