macOS cleaner · Disk analyzer · Uninstaller

Deep clean
for macOS.

GobyStation finds and removes the data macOS and your apps leave behind, maps what is actually filling your disk, and gives you a handle on the apps, background jobs and processes running on your Mac — behind an interface that looks like a diving station rather than a control panel.

Coming soon on theMac App Store See what it does

Requires macOS 14 or later  ·  English and 简体中文

The GobyStation dashboard: live CPU, memory and disk gauges, a scan result reading that 18.38 GB can be cleared across 5 categories, and suggested next steps.
Only what rebuilds itself
is ever preselected
Move to Trash by default
reversible, every time
Nothing leaves your Mac
scans never call out
  • 27Cleanup categories, each with a risk level
  • 9Decks, from Dashboard to Maintenance
  • 20+Developer toolchains whose caches it knows
  • 6Themes, all of them water

Nine decks, one station

Everything the disk is hiding, one panel each.

Every feature is called what it is. The water, the porthole and the fish carry the character; the panels do the work.

  • Dashboard System overview

    Live CPU, memory and disk vitals, a one-click scan, and what to look at next.

  • Cleanup Find and remove junk

    Twenty-seven categories of removable data, each explained, each with a risk level.

  • Disk Analyzer See what fills the disk

    A full disk map: squarified treemap, sunburst, browsable tree, and composition by file type.

  • Large Files Big and forgotten files

    The largest files, and the ones nobody has touched in months.

  • Duplicates Identical copies

    Identical files, verified byte for byte — the same bytes, not just the same name.

  • Applications Installed apps

    Every installed app: size, last opened, architecture — and a complete uninstall that takes the leftovers with it.

  • Startup Items Login items & daemons

    Login items, launch agents and daemons, with a switch for each.

  • Processes Running processes

    The process table, live, with quit and force-quit.

  • Maintenance Repair and housekeeping

    DNS flush, memory purge, Spotlight reindex, permission repair and other one-shot jobs — each says exactly what it does before you run it.

Cleanup · Find and remove junk

Twenty-seven kinds of junk, each explained.

Every category says what it is, why it is safe — or not — to remove, and what happens afterwards. Only items marked Safe, data that regenerates on demand, are ever preselected. Review and Caution items are always yours to choose.

  • SafeRebuilds itself the next time it is needed. Preselected.
  • ReviewAlmost certainly junk, but look at the list first.
  • CautionYours, not the system's. Never preselected.
The Cleanup deck listing categories such as Application Caches, Application Logs and Toolchain & Package Caches, each with a size, an entry count and a risk badge, beside a panel showing 1.59 GB selected for removal with Move to Trash chosen.

System What macOS leaves behind

  • Application Caches
  • Sandboxed App Caches
  • Application Logs
  • Crash & Diagnostic Reports
  • Saved Application State
  • Trash
  • Quick Look Thumbnails
  • Temporary Files
  • Downloaded Software Updates
  • System Logs

Applications Data apps keep for themselves

  • Mail Attachments
  • iPhone & iPad Backups
  • iOS Update Files
  • macOS Installers
  • Autosave Scratch Files

Internet Left over from browsing

  • Browser Caches Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera, Zen, Orion
  • Browser Service Workers

Developer Build output and toolchain caches

  • Toolchain & Package Caches
  • Derived Data, per project
  • Stale node_modules in projects untouched for 90 days
  • Unavailable Simulators

Leftovers From apps that are gone

  • Files From Deleted Apps support folders, preferences, containers
  • Broken Login Items

Downloads & Media What piled up

  • Finished Installers
  • Unpacked Archives
  • Old Screenshots
  • Interrupted Downloads

Developer · The single biggest win on a developer's Mac

Everything your build tools re-download on demand.

Xcode derived dataXcode archivesDevice supportSimulator cachesnpmYarnpnpmBunDenopipuvHomebrewCocoaPodsCarthageGradleMavenCargoGoNuGetComposerpubrustupPuppeteerElectronPlaywrightOllamaHugging Face

Safety

“A cleaner that removes the wrong thing is worse than no cleaner.”

Three rules carry that weight, and the app is built so that none of them can be stepped around.

01

One choke point

Nothing in the app calls the file-removal APIs directly. Every deletion goes through a single removal engine, which re-checks the safety guard even though the caller already did.

02

Explicit permission, not implicit trust

The guard works from allow-lists, not deny-lists. A path must sit inside a folder named as sweepable, must not be inside a protected tree, and must not itself be structural. Because /var, /tmp and /etc are symlinks into /private, every check runs against both spellings.

03

Reversible by default

The default is Move to Trash. Permanent deletion is available, clearly labelled, and requires a second explicit acknowledgement. Confirmation sheets list the actual paths, the risk breakdown and the byte count before anything happens — and a refusal by the guard is reported, never silently skipped.

Refused under every mode

Some places the guard will not enter no matter which mode is selected. Junk sweeps additionally never enter your own documents and media.

/System/bin/usr/private/etcKeychainsSSH keysGPG keysTop level of your home folderDocumentsDesktopPicturesMoviesMusiciCloud DriveMail

  • It will not make your cloud provider download your files.

    Folders under iCloud Drive and other cloud mounts are measured by what they report and never walked, so a survey cannot turn into 200 GB of traffic.

  • It will not hang on a dead mount.

    Every bulk filesystem walk runs on a supervised thread pool that notices a worker has stopped making progress, writes the path off, and carries on. Anything skipped is named in the interface, so the totals are never quietly wrong.

GobyStation's completion card: Done, 231 items removed in 12.4 seconds, 38.4 GB reclaimed, and the note that everything is in the Trash.
After a removal, the card says where everything went. By default, that is the Trash.

The other decks

Built for the rest of the job, too.

The same panels, the same honesty about what is known and what is not — applied to the disk, the apps, the things that start themselves, and the things that are running right now.

Disk Analyzer · Macintosh HD67.1 GB mapped

Squarified treemap, a sunburst, a browsable tree, and composition by file type. Cloud mounts are measured, never walked.

Applications · Installed apps57 apps · 29.6 GB
  • XcXcode v26.0 · opened 1 mo ago4.31 GB
  • DoDocker v4.87 · opened 2 mo ago2.30 GB
  • BlBlender v5.2 248 d idle950 MB
  • FiFigma v125.6 · opened 3 d ago480 MB
  • ZoZoom v6.4 310 d idle290 MB

Blender — you have not opened this in 248 days.

ShowPurgeUninstall
Uninstall removes the app together with the 412 MB of caches, preferences and support files it has accumulated. Purge keeps the app and clears only those.

Size, version, architecture and last opened. Idle apps are flagged, and uninstalling takes the leftovers with it.

Startup Items · Login items & daemons11 start automatically

User agent Runs when you log in, as you.

  • Docker Desktop helper~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.docker.helper.plistrunning
  • Software updater~/Library/LaunchAgents/updater.plist
  • Creative suite launcher~/Library/LaunchAgents/launcher.plist

Global daemon Runs at boot, as root, before login.

  • Backup agent/Library/LaunchDaemons/backup.plistadmin
  • VPN tunnel service/Library/LaunchDaemons/tunnel.plistkeepalive

Login items, launch agents and daemons, with a switch for each. Anything outside your home folder is changed through macOS's own administrator prompt.

Processes · Running processes890 processes
CPU12.4%user 8.1 · system 4.3
Memory15.7 of 24 GB
  • app 9.8 GB
  • wired 3.6 GB
  • compressed 2.3 GB
  • free 8.3 GB
34.6% free
ProcessPIDMemoryCPU
GobyStation/Applications/GobyStation.app1 265301 MB0.6
Safari/Applications/Safari.app8121.21 GB4.2
WindowServer/System/Library/…/WindowServer171612 MB3.8
Xcode/Applications/Xcode.app1 1042.33 GB2.1
kernel_taskmacOS01.80 GB1.9

The process table, refreshing every two seconds, with quit and force-quit. System processes are hidden until you ask for them.

The Maintenance deck: a grid of one-shot jobs such as Flush DNS Cache, Purge Inactive Memory, Rebuild Launch Services, Reindex Spotlight, Restart Finder & Dock, Repair Home Permissions, Verify Startup Disk and Thin Local Snapshots, each with a short explanation and a Run button.
Maintenance — repairs and housekeeping. Each job says exactly what it does before you run it, and which ones need an administrator.

Design

Drawn, not decorated.

Everything is drawn procedurally. The background is a single clock driving four canvas layers — a depth gradient, interfering sine fields for caustics, angled light shafts, marine snow and a bubble curtain — so the whole ocean costs a handful of draw calls rather than hundreds of animated views. The water gets brighter and busier while a scan is running, and darkens as you move to deeper decks.

The theme lives in the visuals, not the vocabulary. Every feature is called what it is — Cleanup, Disk Analyzer, Startup Items — while the water, the porthole and the fish carry the character. The same water you are looking at right now, in fact.

On the cost of all that

An animated background is easy to write and easy to make expensive. The first working version idled at 67% of a core. Almost none of that came from drawing — it came from layout — and fixing it is what makes the water affordable.

  • 18%of one core with everything running
  • 6%with motion turned down to Still water
  • 0%when GobyStation is not the active app

Motion can be turned down to Calm water or off entirely to Still water in Settings. Those settings remove the clocks rather than hiding the layers, so turning motion down actually costs less.

Six themes

All of them stay aquatic — the app should still feel like one body of water — but they differ in depth, temperature and light. Auto follows macOS: Tidepool in Light, Abyss in Dark.

  • Abyss

    Deep teal and bioluminescent cyan. The original.

  • Coral Reef

    Warm shallows — coral, turquoise and sunlight.

  • Kelp Forest

    Green water and amber light under a canopy.

  • Arctic

    Pale ice-blue, cold and very quiet.

  • Midnight

    Almost black, with violet running lights.

  • Tidepool

    A light theme, for bright rooms and daylight.

The optional assistant

An assistant you switch on — not one that watches.

GobyStation can ask a language model what an unfamiliar file is, whether removing it is risky, or what a process belongs to. It is the only part of the app that talks to anything outside the machine, so three rules shape it.

  • Off until you configure it. Scans never call out. Every request is one button press, and the panel keeps the exact payload visible as a record.
  • Names and metadata only. Paths, sizes, dates and identifiers leave the Mac; file contents never do.
  • Your key, your file. The key is kept in a file only your account can read, in the app's own support folder — and the interface says exactly that.
  • Any provider. The Anthropic API by default, or anything speaking the OpenAI chat shape — including a local Ollama, llama.cpp or vLLM server, where no key is needed at all.

An answer is presented as what it is: a language model's opinion, not a check GobyStation performed. The safety guard still governs everything that is actually removed.

Permissions

Asked for plainly, once.

GobyStation is unsandboxed, because a sandboxed app cannot see the folders a cleaner exists to clean. It reads and removes files as you, and nothing more.

GobyStation's first-launch sheet: one permission GobyStation can use — Full Disk Access — with a Grant button, and a note that it is not required.
  • Full Disk Access has no request API, so the app opens the right pane and floats its own icon for you to drag into the list — then notices on its own when you did. Without it, scans see less and say so plainly.
  • Administrator rights are asked for by macOS itself, through the standard prompt, only when a job or log lives outside your home folder. GobyStation never sees or stores the password.

Surfacing soon

Coming soon to the Mac App Store.

GobyStation is being prepared for the App Store. Requires macOS 14 or later.

Coming soon on theMac App Store