v1.5.0 — Normal mode: a Mac cleaner for everyone, not just developers

Mac Cleaner now has two modes. Normal mode is a brand-new interface for anyone who is not a developer: twelve plain-language categories, Move-to-Trash by default, and every row explained in a sentence. Developer mode is the tool you already know, unchanged. You pick once on first launch and can switch any time from the toolbar.

Universal build: one download runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel.

Normal mode

• Twelve categories instead of twenty-six technical ones: System Junk, Trash, Large & Old Files, Duplicate Files, Downloads & Installers, Unused Apps & Leftovers, App Caches, Mail & Message Attachments, Photos/Music & Media, Backups & Updates, Cloud Files on This Mac, and one collapsed card for everything developer-related.
• Move to Trash by default, so a mistake is one "Put Back" away. The counter says what is in the Trash versus what is actually freed — emptying the Trash is what returns the space, and the app now says so.
• A receipt after every clean: what went, what failed, and one click to the failures.
• Keep list: pin any row you never want offered again. It stays kept across scans, and one chip brings them all back.

Where your space actually went

• Cloud Files on This Mac — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive files kept on the disk. Often the largest folder on a normal Mac, and previously invisible. Read-only: freeing them is done from Finder, and the app explains how.
• Mail's downloaded messages are listed (read-only) instead of a category promising "Mail" and showing a few hundred megabytes.
• Screensaver and wallpaper videos macOS downloads in the background (20–65 GB on many Macs).
• Old app updates left behind by Sparkle, Google's updater, Microsoft AutoUpdate and Zoom.
• The Trash on every disk, not just the boot drive.
• iPhone and iPad backups now say which device and when, instead of a 40-character identifier.

Duplicate files, rebuilt

• Finds duplicates from 1 MB (was 5 MB), so photos and documents saved twice show up.
• A thumbnail for every set — click for a bigger preview. A duplicate photo is judged with your eyes, not its filename.
• Each set says what deleting the extras frees, not what the set occupies.
• One copy is always kept. The set checkbox skips the newest file, the confirm dialog marks it, and the server refuses any request that would delete every copy of a set.

See exactly what you are deleting

Every row shows its real path on its own line, and clicking it opens the folder in Finder with the file selected. The confirmation dialog lists paths too.

Permissions

Full Disk Access now explains what is locked ("56 places on your disk cannot be measured yet"), and offers a Quit & Reopen button — macOS only applies the permission to an app that starts after you grant it, which is the step people got stuck on. A fresh Mac with no Safari, Mail or backup data is no longer misread as "already granted".

Fixes

Two independent audit rounds found — and this release fixes — a set of defects worth naming:

• The headline number was wrong. Space that can never be freed (your Photos library, Time Machine snapshots) was counted in "you can free up". It is now reported separately, and every total in the app follows one rule.
• Ticking a whole duplicates category could delete every copy of every set.
• The main scan could walk inside a Photos or Final Cut library and offer its internals as ordinary files.
• Rescanning doubled every total because the previous scan's rows were never cleared.
• "Select all safe" did nothing while a safety filter was active, and froze the interface on large selections (measured 96 ms per frame, now 0.7 ms).
• A single unreadable folder could freeze the app. Three causes, all fixed: iCloud enumeration on the main thread, hashing a cloud placeholder (which makes macOS download it first), and any remaining stall — a watchdog now skips a folder that takes longer than 45 seconds and keeps going.
• iPhone backup labels, Zoom's data row, uninstalled-app leftovers and JetBrains caches all reported wrong sizes or vanished entirely; each is fixed.