MacBooster is an excellent all-round Mac maintenance tool, and I also started my career here at Dealarious with a MacBooster review. After my review, however, a few of my friends came to me with a scary feedback about MacBooster- "Beware. MacBooster could be malware. It is really difficult to uninstall!" I did a little research on this topic, and I was surprised at what I found. But first, let's get a critical question out of the way.
Is MacBooster Malware or Virus?
If you are like me, you probably have a hard time trusting software that does not uninstall. Perhaps, that, is what got so many people worried about the authenticity of MacBooster software in general. Is MacBooster like those malware that just refuse to leave your system no matter how hard you try?
Surely, this behavior of MacBooster was annoying, to say the least, but that is not reason enough to say that MacBooster is malware. We put this to test and reached out to our in-house security expert.
Hi Chinmoy. I am working on a writeup on MacBooster. Is there a chance that it could be talking to a command and control center like a Malware? Can you please investigate this?
Chinmoy
Security Commentator, Dealarious.com
Hi Leslie. I see MacBooster is a well-known Mac maintenance tool from IObit. I'm a power user, and I do my Mac maintenance by hand. I've never used this tool myself. However, I carried out a couple of basic tests to answer your question. Here are my findings.
- MacBooster is no malware or spyware. I took a 15-minute network packet capture with my favorite tool Wireshark, and did not see any unusual network activity. MacBooster is not sending your personal data to any remote computer.
- MacBooster has an absolutely normal memory usage.
- MacBooster's CPU time was double that of BitDefender antivirus. This is slightly unusual, but still no proof of malware. Let me know if you want me to check this area.
- While the main MacBooster app itself reported a disk read of 208 MB, MacBooster Mini reported a higher 293 MB in read bytes. This could just be bad programming, but I still can't call it spyware or malware based on this.
So, is MacBooster spyware or malware? The short answer is no.
Is MacBooster Malware? Our Verdict.
With ample help from Chinmoy, it seemed like MacBooster divides its workload between the MacBooster Mini app and the main app.
The Mini app has to do some heavy lifting in the form of a real-time monitoring of the trash and the HDD size. Perhaps, that results in the higher activity load reported by MacBooster Mini. But one thing is for sure. MacBooster is safe to use.
Now that we have established that you do not have to live in constant fear of your data being stolen with MacBooster, let's see how to uninstall MacBooster completely.
How to Uninstall MacBooster 6 Completely?
Remember the surprise I was talking about? Well, it looks like MacBooster used to have some real uninstall issues and it got many users frustrated and lose trust in the application. However, that was the story of version 3. MacBooster 6 seems to have fixed this, and I was able to uninstall both MacBooster and MacBooster Mini with these normal steps.
Uninstall MacBooster in 3 easy steps:
So, once you have uninstalled MacBooster the way you would normally do on your Mac, you can also check the activity monitor to see if MacBooster Mini still shows up, and it doesn't in my case.
Final Word
There is no universe where weird behavior like this is justified, and MacBooster should have fixed it a long time ago. This is how a perfectly okayish software can earn itself a bad reputation, by ignoring feedback from its paying users. No problems though, better late than never.
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This uninstall issue seems to have been fixed in MacBooster 5 and from now, uninstalling MacBooster will uninstall the MacBooster Mini app also. MacBooster no longer needs a special hack or manual removal of files of any kind.
Do you use MacBooster? You can read my review of MacBooster and find out if it is of any help to you. If you have any stories of zero-day disk-space recovery, do share them with us and we will feature your comment if it adds value to our article.
The three attributes that define me- Tech lover, Blogger, and Dog lover. I primarily cover Cyber Security, online privacy, and also have keen interest in exploring new software that make daily computing easier for home users. I do love to spend quality time away from the internet, so when I am not online, I either cook or bike.
MacKeeper was my favorite cleaner app and shocked to know that they literally run like a malware after a while. Unable to uninstall or remove it completely. I had to reinstall my mac os x after few months of usage. It was good for a start but not after few months.
Sad to see many premium apps in the name of performance booster comes as malwares in mac.
Robin.
Hi Robin. I’m just curious, how was your experience with Mackeeper? Can you give me a little testimonial? I am writing a review and that can be part of my research.