How to Clean the Application Support Folder on Mac

If you've ever opened ~/Library and sorted its folders by size, one of them almost certainly dwarfs the rest: Application Support. On most Macs it's larger than Caches, larger than Preferences, and often larger than every other Library folder combined. That makes it tempting to treat the same way you'd treat Caches — open it up, delete what looks unfamiliar, and reclaim the space.

Don't. Application Support is fundamentally different from Caches, and treating it the same way is how people lose real data. Caches is disposable by design — every app expects its cache to disappear occasionally and knows how to rebuild it. Application Support is where apps keep things they can't rebuild: your actual settings, your actual saved data, sometimes your actual documents. This guide explains what's really in there, why it's riskier to touch than Caches, and the specific, narrow situations where cleaning it is actually safe.

What Application Support actually is

~/Library/Application Support/ is the folder macOS apps use to store the data they need to function but that doesn't belong anywhere more specific. It's a catch-all by design, which is exactly why it grows so large and so inconsistently — one app might use it for a few kilobytes of configuration, while another stores gigabytes of content there.

It's easy to confuse with ~/Library/Preferences/, but they're not the same thing. Preferences holds small .plist files — simple key-value settings like window positions or toggle states. Application Support holds the heavier, more structured stuff: things an app would genuinely struggle to function without, and in some cases can't regenerate at all if it's deleted.

What's actually stored there

The specifics vary enormously by app, but a few categories show up constantly:

• Extended settings and configuration. Beyond the simple toggles in Preferences, many apps keep more complex configuration here — custom keyboard shortcut sets, workspace layouts, connected account tokens, and similar structured settings that don't fit neatly into a .plist.
• Local databases holding your actual content. This is the category people most often don't expect. A note-taking app may store every note you've ever written in a local database here. A chat app may keep your entire message history in this folder. These aren't cache copies of data stored safely elsewhere — for many apps, this folder is the only copy, unless the app syncs to its own cloud service.
• Downloaded extensions, plugins, and dictionaries. Browsers keep extension data here. Some creative and productivity apps download plugins, custom dictionaries, or language packs into Application Support after installation rather than bundling them in the app itself.
• Licensing and activation data. Some apps store license keys or activation state in Application Support. Delete the wrong file and you may find yourself re-entering a license key or re-activating a purchase.
• Large asset libraries that look like cache but aren't. A design app might keep its entire library of fonts, templates, or brush sets here. These files can be large enough to look like disposable cache, but unlike a true cache folder, the app may not be able to re-download or regenerate all of it automatically — sometimes it's tied to what you've purchased or imported.

The common thread: almost everything in Application Support represents something the app would have to ask you to redo, re-download, re-license, or simply lose, if it disappeared. That's a very different risk profile from a cache file that quietly regenerates itself the next time you launch the app.

The safety rule: this isn't Caches

Here's the rule worth remembering, because it cuts directly against the instinct that works fine for Caches: for an app you still use, don't delete anything inside its Application Support subfolder unless you specifically intend to reset that app back to factory settings— and you're accepting that this means losing its saved data, settings, licensing state, or content along with it.

That's a meaningfully different rule from the advice for ~/Library/Caches/, where the guidance is close to "always safe to clear." Caches is designed around the assumption that deleting it costs you nothing but a slightly slower relaunch. Application Support carries no such guarantee. An app's cache folder and its Application Support folder can sit right next to each other, with similarly plain-looking names, and behave completely differently when you delete their contents. That similarity is exactly what makes this folder risky to clean by eye — nothing about a folder's name tells you which rule applies to it.

If you do want to reset a specific app to a clean slate — troubleshooting a corrupted preference, starting fresh after test data, or genuinely wanting to wipe an app's settings — deleting its Application Support subfolder (with the app fully quit first) is a legitimate way to do that. Just go in understanding that's what you're choosing, not assuming you're reclaiming "junk."

When it is safe to clean here

There are two situations where cleaning inside Application Support is genuinely low-risk:

• The app is completely uninstalled. Once an app is gone from /Applications, its Application Support subfolder has nothing left to serve — there's no "resetting" an app that no longer exists. This is a different problem from what this article covers, and we treat it in detail in our companion guide on removing app leftovers — for apps you've already uninstalled, that's the guide to use.
• A known cache-like subfolder that landed in the wrong place. Some apps, for their own reasons, create large cache-like data inside their Application Support folder instead of in the proper ~/Library/Caches/ location — a subfolder explicitly named "Cache," "Cached Data," or similar, sitting inside an otherwise legitimate Application Support folder. When a subfolder is unambiguously labeled as cache by the app itself, clearing just that specific subfolder is reasonable. The important word is specific — this isn't license to clear the whole app's folder, just the clearly-labeled cache portion inside it.

Outside of those two cases, treat everything else in a currently-installed app's Application Support folder as off-limits for casual cleanup.

How to navigate to Application Support

To see it for yourself: open Finder, click the Go menu in the menu bar, choose Go to Folder (or press Cmd+Shift+G), and type ~/Library/Application Support, then press Return.

Once you're in there, switch to list view and sort by size — click the "Size" column header, or use View → Sort By → Size. That immediately surfaces which apps are actually responsible for the bulk of the folder, rather than leaving you to guess from names alone. It's common to find that two or three apps account for the overwhelming majority of the space, while dozens of smaller folders barely register.

Seeing the size breakdown is useful even if you don't delete anything — it tells you where your storage is actually going, which is often the more interesting question than "what can I delete." If one of those large folders belongs to an app you use heavily and store a lot of content in, that's expected and not a problem to solve.

Still-installed data vs. leftover data

The hardest part of dealing with Application Support by hand isn't finding it — it's telling apart "this folder belongs to an app I still use and need" from "this folder belongs to an app I removed two years ago." Folder names don't make this easy. Both categories can be named after an app you vaguely recognize, named after a developer's bundle identifier you don't recognize at all, or named generically enough to tell you nothing either way. Getting that judgment wrong in the direction of deleting too much means losing saved data, settings, or licensing for an app you actually still rely on.

This is exactly the distinction CleanMyApple's app leftover finder is built around. It doesn't try to guess which files "look" safe to remove inside a still-installed app's folder — it only flags Application Support items (along with Preferences, Caches, and Containers) that are tied to apps no longer present in your Applications folder at all. If an app is still installed, its Application Support data simply isn't a candidate, full stop. You get a list to review, with nothing moved to the Trash until you confirm it.

If you're uninstalling an app right now rather than cleaning up after an old one, it's worth doing it properly from the start so Application Support doesn't quietly accumulate orphaned folders in the first place. Our guide on how to completely uninstall apps on Mac covers removing an app and its supporting files together, the first time.

The short version worth carrying away from all of this: Caches is where you clean freely. Application Support is where you check first — what app it belongs to, whether that app is still installed, and whether you actually intend to reset it — before anything gets deleted.