How to uninstall App Cleaner & Uninstaller on Mac

App Cleaner & Uninstaller is Nektony's app remover, installed as App Cleaner 10.app. Nothing it keeps on your Mac is personal data: its folders hold settings, the lists it builds while scanning, its firewall rules and update caches. What you may want to keep is the license, so deactivate or note it before you start; Nektony's FAQ asks you to uninstall the app from the old Mac before activating the key on a new one. This guide covers the Chinese-region edition tested here, whose bundle ID is com.nektony.App-Cleaner-SIIICn. The international edition from nektony.com and the Homebrew cask app-cleaner use com.nektony.App-Cleaner-SIII in the same places; replace SIIICn with SIII in the paths below for that edition.

Quit the app and its two helpers

1. Quit App Cleaner & Uninstaller with Command + Q.
2. App Cleaner starts two login items from inside its bundle, App Cleaner Monitor CN and App Cleaner Helper CN. Open System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions and turn both off, or quit them from their menu bar icon if you see one.
3. Open Activity Monitor and search for nektony. While it ran in the test there were eight processes; after quitting, nothing should be left.

Use Nektony's own Remove button, or move the app to the Trash

Nektony's FAQ describes the built-in removal: open the app's Settings, switch to the Advanced tab, scroll to the bottom and click Remove. That flow was not run in this test. The manual way is to move App Cleaner 10.app from Applications to the Trash, as described in Apple's Delete or uninstall apps on Mac, then open each path below with Shift + Command + G in Finder.

Where App Cleaner keeps its files

Check the result

pgrep -il nektony
launchctl list | grep -i nektony
ls -d "/Applications/App Cleaner 10.app" ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.nektony.App-Cleaner-SIIICn ~/Library/Group\ Containers/8DKG4XB37M.group.com.nektony.App-Cleaner-SIIICn

• No output from pgrep means neither the app nor its helpers are running. A printed line names a process that is still alive; quit it, or restart the Mac once.
• No output from launchctl means neither login item is loaded. A line ending in -Monitor or -UIHelper means it is still registered; turn it off in Login Items & Extensions, or log out and back in after the app is gone.
• For ls -d, "No such file or directory" means that path is gone. A printed path is still on disk.
• Login Items & Extensions may keep showing the two helpers until the Trash is emptied; that list is kept by macOS, and it clears itself once the bundle they live in is gone.

If you installed it with Homebrew

brew uninstall --cask app-cleaner

The cask installs the international edition, and its ordinary uninstall removes only App Cleaner 10.app. brew uninstall --cask --zap app-cleaner also deletes its zap list, which names the SIII folders, the app group 8DKG4XB37M.group.com.nektony.App-Cleaner-SIII and the older App Cleaner Pro locations; it does not read Mole's checkboxes. Mole adds --zap only when every zap path is inside ~/Library and matches rows you reviewed. The app group is a row Mole never lists, so Mole leaves --zap off and removes the rows you selected itself. The Homebrew install was not tested.

What Mole lists

Mole selects the app, its Application Support folder, both caches, both preferences files, the web storage folders, the app's own Application Scripts folder, its temporary caches and the crash reports of the app and its helpers. The helper's preferences file is listed for review and starts checked. A crash report that macOS wrote to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports as root is listed but starts unchecked. Before removing, Mole asks the app to quit and unloads both login items. Mole does not list the app group folders or the group preferences file, since it cannot prove from outside that no other app shares that group, and it leaves com.nektony.Common.plist and other Nektony groups alone. Status shows App Cleaner & Uninstaller as one row with all its processes, and the update page reads Nektony's own Sparkle feed.

What this test covered

On October 31, 2026, App Cleaner & Uninstaller 10.0.3, Chinese-region edition, was installed from Nektony's disk image on two Macs and removed with a source-built Mole. On the Mac with Full Disk Access, Mole moved the app and 18 rows to the Trash. On the test Mac without Full Disk Access, it moved the app and 19 rows; the root-owned report stayed unchecked, and one recent-documents record could not be read. Both login items ran as background jobs before the uninstall, and neither was loaded afterwards. Status showed one row with eight processes, and the update channel was Nektony's Sparkle feed. Afterwards the app group folders, the group preferences file and the shared Nektony preferences remained, as described above, and were then removed by hand. No license was activated, Nektony's own Remove button was not used, and the Homebrew cask was not tested.