MacBooster Review: It’s No Surprise People Think It’s Malware

Best prices today: MacBooster

There’s no shortage of Mac utilities that claim to do it all and offer a smorgasbord of features, all while delivering unbeatable antivirus protection, gigabytes and gigabytes of reclaimed disk space, and unprecedented speed. iObit’s MacBooster is one of them, but what could be a decent utility that does most of its intended functions is haunted by a marketing team that categorizes harmless cookie files as virus threats, works to scare users into signing up for subscriptions, and turns out to be one of the worst in the computer industry.

We’ll get into the details later. After installing MacBooster (version 8.2 at the time of our test) and its iTop VPN client, everything seems normal. The software installs easily, works well on macOS Sonoma 14.6, supports everything from macOS 10.9 (Sierra) and after giving it full disk permissions, you’re good to go.

While it does offer a free download, MacBooster comes with varying prices depending on the tier you choose. At the time of writing, Standard, which allows activation for 1 Mac, is priced at $2.49 (around £1.95) per month (usually $3.33 (£2.61) per month), or you can pay $29.95 (around £23.44) per year. Premium is priced at $4.16 (£3.26) per month (usually $4.99 (£3.91) per month), or $49.95 (£39) per year at the moment, and allows activation on 3 Macs. Lite (which seems to be a more expensive option) costs $89.95 (£70.43) per year at the moment (usually $99.95 (£78.26) per year) and allows activation on 5 Macs. Despite the monthly payment option, these are 12-month plans, so there’s no option to subscribe for a month and then cancel.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

The software works around the modules System Status, System Junk, Virus & Malware Scan, Turbo Boost, Memory Cleanup, Privacy Protection, Uninstaller, Startup Optimization, Large & Old Files, Duplicate Finder, and Photo Scan. Each module performs its own function and multiple modules can run simultaneously, which is handy. The iTop VPN client that comes with MacBooster works as a fairly basic VPN with minimal customization features and can connect to foreign servers to help mask an IP address, as you would expect from any VPN client. [See: Best Mac VPNs if you require a VPN].

Although MacBooster offers decent performance and features, an initial test of the System Status module ruined everything. After letting the test run and the application get a general idea of ​​my system, the application declared that my operating system was threatened by 229 threats, that it was categorized as “Dangerous” and that the only way to eliminate these hundreds of threats to my operating system and data was to upgrade from my free version of MacBooster to the licensed version, which would help eradicate the danger in question.

On top of that, I noticed that about 20 different security companies, including Avast, Avira, Google, Microsoft, and Symantec, were currently identifying MacBooster as adware, while a copy of Malwarebytes I keep on my M2 Mac Studio identified the software as adware and offered to remove it. The very handy MacUpdater, which I learned to use, also classified the software as malware and refused to update it, making it all the more suspicious. See: Best Antivirus for Mac.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Additionally, the bundled iTop VPN client, which installed fine, failed to be used on my Mac Studio, with an error message stating, “For policy reasons, iTop VPN is not available in your country/region. We apologize for the inconvenience.” The app did install and work fine on two other test machines, but it was an obscure error message that bordered on legal gray areas, and questions about the larger issue went unanswered by iObit staff.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

There was some good: Several modules proved useful, and modules like Duplicate Finder was able to dig through my hard drives and find 34.4GB of redundant files and delete them, and Photo Sweeper located 5,340 duplicates in 1,692 groups and offered a precise way to delete individual photos. On the other hand, Photo Sweeper lacked user interface options like a “Select All” function to help eliminate all duplicates at once. Granted, a decent user manual is in place throughout the app and can also be found online, but grammatical errors in the app and on iObit’s website (including a product description that calls the software “super fast and stable”) are cringe-inducing, as the website cites support for macOS Big Sur, which came out in 2020 and left behind three major revisions of the operating system three years ago.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Other elements, like the scroll bar that blends into the background and doesn’t stand out in the menu interface, make using MacBooster even more frustrating, and the lack of timers on various modules deprives users of knowing how much time has passed and how much longer to wait before a task is completed.

Should you buy MacBooster?

We can’t really recommend it. Yes, there are some features here, but almost all of MacBooster’s competitors do it better, and without resorting to classifying Google Chrome’s cookie files as virus threats and trying to scare the user into buying a license for the software. This is arguably the lowest form of software development fueled by a rancid marketing department that has too much control over a product, and the idea that “Okay, we’ll offer a free version of the software, but scare the user into thinking we’re their only salvation” ranks right up there with every phishing scam in existence where an unwary user ends up calling a group of sociopaths working in a boiler room to give them several hundred dollars and be told that their computer is now virus-free. MacBooster itself feels like a cheap copy of any other multi-purpose utility on the market, and I’ll happily uninstall it from my Macs and never think about it again.

You will find a better option here: Best Mac Cleaning Software.