If you ever used a Mac and had to install an application, you probably noticed that often there’s no installer unlike on Windows. You just drag and drop the application to your /Applications folder. The downside is, there’s often also no uninstaller for those applications.

Now, you might say “just drag and drop the application to the trash” and you’re right, you can do that. And it will be successfully uninstalled.

There’s just one problem: An application generates application data, which won’t be automatically deleted that way.

Which is why I wanted to share a free application I found that contains no ads and is lightweight, and tries to find all the application data to delete together with the application itself.

I wanted to uninstall “Rosetta Stone”, the original 32-bit application that does not work on macOS Catalina anymore. The application “Rosetta Stone” in itself needs about 150 MB of storage, and had I just dragged and dropped it into the trash, that would have been the end of the story.

But as it turns out, there’s over 2.5 GB of application data (in this case language files) that would have been left behind. That’s valuable disk space (especially with those Apple premiums) that can be better used for other things.

The application AppCleaner allows you to drag and drop an application into it – instead of into the trash – and it will try to find the related application data. Then with a click on “Remove” it will put the to-be-deleted application together with its application data into the trash for you.

As you can see on the screenshot above, AppCleaner found a total of 2.71 GB worth of data to be deleted. Had I just dragged and dropped “Rosetta Stone” into the trash by itself, I would have left over 2.5 GB of data behind.

So, if you plan on uninstalling applications, try AppCleaner which you can get for free from here.

Note that I tested version 3.5 of AppCleaner on macOS Catalina. This post was not sponsored.

I hope I showed you something useful today to save some disk space! Happy uninstalling and cleaning up!