“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,” Peter Cohen writes for iMore. “Removing MacKeeper fixes the problem. So what is MacKeeper and why should you avoid it?”
“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,” Cohen writes. “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.”
“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,” Cohen writes. “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… 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.”
Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Exactly. It’s slimeware.