We do this in the first place because once uninstalled, we cannot easily tell AppCleaner which application files to look for. Remove unnecessary files with AppCleanerĪt this point, we recommend that you download AppCleaner, a free and, in our experience, effective tool that searches for all files associated with an application and removes them.Īll you have to do is drag the MacKeeper icon (use the one in Applications, not the shortcut in the menu bar) onto the AppCleaner, and then agree to delete the files it finds. (We have a newer version where the Settings option only updates the tracker and account.)ĭon’t do anything else in MacKeeper – don’t subscribe to anything, don’t click anything. Just exit the app. We’re going to open MacKeeper first, which may seem counterintuitive, but we’d like to double-check a few things before proceeding with the uninstallation. You may have never opened it before, or even knew it was on your system, but look in your Applications folder and you’ll see it there. Double click the icon to launch the application.Ĭlick the MacKeeper drop-down menu and choose Preferences. If you have an older version of the program, you will see the General tab: select it, then uncheck the box next to Show MacKeeper icon in menu bar if it is there. The source of the “contagion” is, of course, less important than the way to get rid of it. Others reported that MacKeeper was installed on their system after downloading a seemingly harmless Adobe update – it looks like a fake infected version of Acrobat Reader was launched at some point. It’s hard to be sure. We brought it up after (somewhat recklessly) a quick step-by-step installation of three Android emulators for Mac: Andy, BlueStacks, and VirtualBox. So we suspect it should have been bundled with one of them, but we don’t know which one – and indeed, it might have been the connected download site that was to blame, and not the apps themselves. How to get rid of pop-ups How did I even get MacKeeper on my Mac? Unfortunately, it looks like you have MacKeeper installed on your system. (In addition to the “Recommended System Scan” pop-up, this application has a “Tracking Update” pop-up that you may have seen as well.) This is a tricky program to uninstall, but we’ll show you how in this article. We also have a more general guide on how to uninstall Mac apps.īy the way, MacKeeper is probably not malware. We’ve heard from some Mac owners who actually found this helpful but its resistance to deletion and the seemingly clever way to find it on the system without the user knowingly installing it are not the behavior of a respectable application. I keep getting a pop-up with the message “System scan recommended: click Start Scan to run system diagnostics.” But I don’t recognize the logo in the popup and I’m sure my Mac doesn’t need to be scanned. Is it malware and how to get rid of it? We’ll show you how to uninstall MacKeeper, a persistent security application that can cause strange “Recommended System Scan” pop-ups, as well as how to find and remove all related files.

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