Hi everyone,
I've been building a free, open-source macOS app called ACleaner that bundles three everyday maintenance tools into one window, designed from the ground up with VoiceOver in mind.
This has been completely built using Claude code, as i am myself not a coder, but i am a Voiceover user on my Mac, and i got sick of using paid apps which would cost money but still not be accessible.
The three tools:
- **Updater** -- checks Homebrew and Mac App Store apps for updates, shows download sizes and release notes, and lets you update everything in one go
- **Disk Detective** -- scans over 30 known locations for caches, logs, and leftover files eating your disk space
- **Clean Uninstall** -- watches the Trash and automatically offers to remove leftover preferences and support files whenever you delete an app
What makes it VoiceOver-friendly:
- Sidebar navigation -- each tool is a clearly labelled list item, no guessing
- Every list row reads as one complete element (name, version, size, state) -- no drilling through sub-elements
- VoiceOver rotor actions on every row for quick access to skip, update, or get release notes
- Key events are announced automatically -- scan complete, update started, cleanup done -- so you never have to hunt for a status field
- No spinners, progress bars, or box-drawing layouts
- Native macOS password dialogs when admin rights are needed
- One-time permissions setup on first launch so you're never interrupted by repeated prompts mid-task
It's completely free, built from plain Swift with no Xcode project needed, and compiles from source in under two minutes.
github.com/radcan1/ACleaner
Please share your inputs so that i can make this better and more useful for our community.
PS:
Apart from using Claud code, i have also pulled the open source code from Pearcleaner and and Mole Clean and taken some inspiration from their feature set.
Comments
Ok but why is this better than clean my mac? Because
Bluntly speaking, clean my mac is accessible in and out. This from using the app for years and yes; i'm also talking about the latest version its accessible still. So what does your app do or provide that clean my mac doesn't? Accessibility doesn't count; as said, clean my mac is accessible. As to what you said specifically this,
I got sick of using paid apps which would cost money...
That part? I get. Fair enough. I personally do not agree but, to each their own.
However this part,
but still not be accessible.
that's, to be blunt; quite misleading because as said clean my mac is fully voiceover accessible.
I don't know if the its not accessible was on purpose or not but You might want to change that part, just a suggestion as its not true.
Just setting the record straight as far as clean my mac is concerned.
With that beeing said, given there are other free tools that do the same as yours, i.e, onix, what' does your tool provide that makes it, superior to onix etc? I.e, why would users of say, clean my mac, onix, or' similar tools be compelled to switch to your app? i’m not asking this to be harsh, but this is something that whenever you’re selling a product, whether it’s free or not, you have to ask yourself these types of questions.
Yet another app that does the same exact shit
K, can we not reinvent the wheel here? I too would love to know what exactly makes this different besides coded with strictly AI. To be quite honest, saying that clean my mac is not accessible is purely false. It totally is. So please let's not spread around misinformation please? I am quite honestly getting sick and tired of false info being spread around these parts!
Proceed with caution
Personally, I'd strongly advise caution when using something like this, or any entirely AI-generated app whose code hasn't been audited by human coders, particularly if you're not a coder yourself. Maintenance utilities like Clean My Mac and Onyx are powerful tools capable of destructive actions, and developing and maintaining them requires intimate familiarity with the regularly evolving inner workings of macOS. With the current state of AI, coupled with the wide range of permissions that such apps request in order to function, it's not hard to imagine how an oversight in the code could be missed, and consequently result in data loss or functional or security compromises for users.
re: Proceed with caution
Now that you bring that up, yeah I won't be even attempting to take a look at this. Honestly if you're not a coder and you do not know how to even read the code nor even how to work with it if you need to fix something and you're relying on AI to do all of this, ya shouldn't even be attempting something like this, much less code the thing if you have no idea on how to do that in the first place. Yeah I ain't trusting this at all! It would be a different story if you know a bit about code and how to read and put in some the work but honestly. This screams red flags.
Thanks for the feedback
Alright folks, thanks so much for all the inputs and feedback.
Some context:
- I was earlier using Clean my mac X, which i found quite inaccessible, its possible that the newest version is more accessible, so thats my bad, and i will be fixing the post to reflect that.
In terms of feature set:
There are two apps in the developer community, one is Pearcleaner and the other is Mole Clean.
These are far more popular and advanced as compared to Clean My Mac, and both are open source.
The challenge with both of these is that Pearcleaner is inaccessible with Voiceover, and Mole Clean is largely accessed via the Terminal which can also be a bit daunting for VOiceover users.
As mentioned in my post above i had pulled the source code for both of these open source projects, and combined feature sets from both, and additionally wrapped it in swift code to ensure full voiceover accessibility.
In terms of safety, there are multiple steps taken:
1. Nothing gets auto deleted, everything is clearly labelled and marked so that you can select exactly what you want to remove and what you want to keep.
2. All the file paths and names are easily readable with voiceover so that you don't accidentally delete something which is important.
2. Even when you do delete something, it goes to your trash so that it is easily recoverable.
3. This tool doesn't do any of the maintenance work of onyx such as rebuilding caches and libraries etc, i didn't want to get into that aspect because i already find Onyx quite accessible.
Some other interesting features:
I found Mole clean to be able to find a lot of orphan files and folders on my internal drive which were never picked up by Clean My Mac, or many of the other tools out there.
So as mentioned i pulled the Mole Clean source code and used that with a UI on top.
As a result the ACleaner tool was far more efficient at finding orphan files. In fact i was quite surprised to see some of the stuff it surfaced, applications which i had deleted many months, and in some cases many years ago, which had left behind wierd files.
Another feature i didn't find in Clean My Mac or any other tool is the ability to have a UI to review all the local time machine snapshots saved on my hard drive.
ACleaner gives you a list of them, and you can individually select the ones you want to remove. This is by far and away the biggest space saver, and does nothing destructive to your Mac.
A cool feature which i found useful for myself but i never was able to find on other tools is a time based disk detective tool to see where space has been going.
This feature allows the user to see what are the large files that have been written to your internal drive over the last few hours, or days or week. This includes hidden files so that you can see if anything has been clogging your drive in the background without you knowing about it.
Lastly, you can keep in mind a few things:
1. All the code is open source so it can be peer reviewed to ensure there is nothing malicious
2. Your mac will require you to insert your sudo password before taking any action that may be destructive
3. You can take a time machine snapshot before taking any action, in fact i do this before using any cleaner such as Onyx, or Clean My Mac or any other such cleaner in the same category. This gives you peace of mind that any damage you may do can be easily and quickly rolled back.
Beyond that, you're welcome to not use it, call it shit, or tell me that we don't need to reinvent the wheel.
I found it super super handy for myself and i'm very happy with it, and a bunch of my personal contacts found it useful too, so i thought i would open it up to a wider community.
EDIT
I almost forgot to mention that the updater function in this tool also checks for Home brew-installed apps and not just the regular apps installed via the Mac App Store. Secondly, the cleaner function also helps you to find and clean old and outdated Home brew formulae and dependencies. This piece alone ended up saving me a few hundred MB of space.
While writing my post earlier, i also realized that i take a local time machine snapshot before running any clean up activities, be it with Mole Clean, or Clean My Mac, or even with my own tool. So i've now baked that into ACleaner as a feature, where it will ask you if you want to do this before you start deleting any files which it has detected.
Again the benefit of this is that you don't need to mess around in the terminal, and everything happens within the UI itself, and of course it gives you the insurance that in case you do manage to inadvertently delete something critical, you can always roll back from recovery mode.
Lastly, I am able to edit my most recent comment on this thread, which I have created, but somehow there is no option to edit the original post. Does anybody know if there is a time limit within which or beyond which we cannot edit, or is there something else which I am missing?
Editing post
You should tap on view tab then this should bring up an edit, tab I think.
Odd about clean my mac x. That was the version I was using a few years ago; before I upgrated to the newest version last year and yes; it’s accessible as well. Kind of a complex layout yes but again, fully accessible. What parts did you have trouble with?