What 'MacKeeper' is and why you should avoid it

Literally every time I work in the computer store, we'll get a customer whose Mac is plagued with problems they don't understand: Their Mac is acting slow. It crashes. And more. And in more cases than not, we find that they've installed a program called MacKeeper. Removing MacKeeper fixes the problem. So what is MacKeeper and why should you avoid it?

MacKeeper was originally developed by a company called Zeobit and was sold a couple of years ago to another firm called Kromtech. The software purports to be a suite of more than a dozen individual utilities that are actually supposed to improve the performance and stability of your Mac — antivirus software, optimization software, junk removal tools and more.

MacKeeper uses scare ads that appear as "pop-under" ads on web sites, telling people to clean their Macs. The pop-under business is the first thing I really don't like about MacKeeper. Quite frankly, I think it's a real bottom-feeder technique and a really low-class way to do business, and it tells me that they're not concerned with what people think of them.

MacKeeper's developers have been called out in the past for hosting fake web sites promoting their products and also for "sockpuppeting" phony user reviews. When they've been called out on this behavior in the past, they've conveniently blamed it on overly zealous affiliate marketers, saying it's not them, it's someone else. I'd posit that if your affiliate marketing strategy is attracting lying douchebags and scum, then you're the problem as much as they are.

But the real problems with MacKeeper that I can see is that it provides questionable value to most users, can destabilize an otherwise stable Mac, and embeds itself so thoroughly into the operating system that removing it is an uncomfortable and weird process.

Removing a Mac app should never be more involved than dragging it into the Trash and emptying the Trash, and perhaps entering an administrative password if it's a legit app you've downloaded from the Mac App Store. MacKeeper tries to get in your way, makes you verify that you don't want it, and even prompts you to explain why. That's not cool. That's certainly not something supported by Apple's own interface guidelines for legitimate app developers.

What's more, "uninstalling" MacKeeper doesn't get rid of all of it — you'll find various traces of it in your Mac's system library folder, and they take a bit to get rid of (just search for anything with zeobit or MacKeeper in the name, and you'll turn up files).

I've seen multitudes of forum posts and comments on web sites calling MacKeeper a virus or a malware package. The pathetic thing is that it isn't. It's just extremely persistent, poorly developed software whose developer tries very hard to keep you using the software and engages in really shady tactics to get you to use it in the first place.

I don't really understand all the whys of MacKeeper destabilizing an operating system, but I can tell you unequivocally that when we pull it from customers' Macs, they don't have those same problems anymore.

The folks who sell this software aren't thieves, for whatever it's worth. My own father tried it out on his Mac, paid for it, and immediately regretted it. After he finally extricated MacKeeper from his Mac, he requested a refund — and after a time got one, fortunately. So they will refund you if you feel like you got ripped off. (And no, he didn't come to my store to have it fixed — he's a bit more self-sufficient.)

So if you've ever seen an ad for MacKeeper — even if it's here on iMore — and thought about giving it a try, my recommendation is not to. And if you do and run into problems, don't say I didn't warn you.

Microsoft has native AV: Defender. While my corporate systems require that we use Symantec for AV and firewall, my entire home lab environment is devoid of third party applications, and I feel safe and sound.

I transitioned all of my business clients over to Microsoft Defender from other commercial products last year. I finally thought MS got its act together on AV and so far, so good. Only occasionally do I need to run something like Malwarebytes to remove a particularly heinous bug on one of my clients' computers or go "dumpster diving into the Registry" to root something out, that has Defender installed. . . and that's usually because someone did something stupid like turning Defender off. Usually the stupid person has been someone the office staff called in from Comcast or AT&T to do something with the Internet instead of calling me. . . who turns it off and forgets to turn it back on.

Oh well, most of the time I get to charge the client to fix the mess.

Symantec? Oh, my . . . some sales person was very persuasive with someone in your corporate management. I consider Symantec the next thing to Malware itself on a Windows machine. Its presence on a computer is one of the things I find that adds the most overhead.

My bad experiences with Symantec goes back many years when Norton Back Up for Mac was the pre-eminate back-up system for MacOS in the mid-nineties. They were using it at the Charity I founded for the database of clients. One afternoon a client walked up and picked up the Mac that was doing double duty as the server, saying "Hey! Cute gadget!" and hit the power switch right in the middle of operations from multiple Macs on the network. . . and truncated a hundred megabyte database to under 5MB in size. Oops!

I told the staff, not to worry. . . we would only loose current data from that day, because we had daily back-ups done with Norton. We had three sets of back-up disks, rotated daily. I got out the most recents set of back-up disks from the day before. . . and started restoration of the database. I got to disk 25 and a requestor popped up on the screen that said: "We are sorry but disk 25 is corrupted! Cancel? Continue?" No matter what you did, the Restore quit and nothing was restored. . . the file was STILL 5MB in size! So, I said, no problem, get the next back-up set. That came out of the safe and I started a Restore. . . and got to disk 8. . . and got "We are sorry but disk 8 is corrupted! Cancel? Continue?" Same result. Went to the last and final back-up set. . . and got to disk 49 and got "We are sorry but disk 49 is corrupted! . . . " ARRRGGGHHH!

I called Norton and asked them "What do you do when you run into a corrupted back-up disk? How can you skip it and finish restoring your data?" Their answer? "Uh, uh, gee, we don't know. . . the data has to be restored sequentially. We never thought about that!"

The idiots suggested using the disks from Set 1 to disk 25, substitute the rest from set 2, disk 26, and see what happens. . . so I did. . . and it said "This disk is not from the same set, Please eject it and replace it with Disk 26 from the correct set! Cancel Continue" This showed me they knew NOTHING about how their back-up system worked.

I tried editing the links but no go. . . the "corrupt" disks were literally BLANK, never formatted. . . so it was the NORTON software that screwed up in the back-up procedure. ARRGGHHH... THREE YEARS of data, gone in an instant. And the back-ups that we had been doing religiously were garbage.

I had several other companies using Norton for backup check their backups and about 10% found similar blank disks in their back-up sets!

Another time I was called into an Optometrists office to find out why his computer was working so SLOWLY . . . Reason: Symantec software was taking 95% of the processor time. FIVE different Symantec packages were arguing about priority . . . and these were NOT five differently installed packages, these were all installed as part of the anti-virus subscription. They just could not agree which order they should run, so they were all running at once with equal priority!

Another time, one of my clients had ten minutes to get a business saving bid in on time. . . and SEMANTEC decided that THEN was the ideal time to lock up the computer and download an update. . . refusing to allow anything else to be done until IT was finished 15 minutes later. HE WAS ROYALLY pissed. He wound up borrowing his next door neighbor's computer and hand entering his bid! ARRGGGHHHH!

Did I mention how much SLUDGE Symantec and Norton leave hanging around after software removal?

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