One of our Macs kept filling up its SSD even though there isn’t supposed to be anything more stored on it. Photos is set to optimize its storage, and Messages is set to only keep messages for a year. It should be pretty much in a steady state, but we kept getting alerts from Mail that it couldn’t launch because there wasn’t enough free space. It’s an M4 MacBook Air used mostly for Web stuff, but somehow it felt as slow as the Intel one it had replaced.

I deleted unused apps and offloaded photos. Restarting sometimes helped, so I thought maybe it was an issue with Time Machine snapshots not being reclaimed promptly, which has been an issue before. But what data would even be changing so much to create large snapshots?

The problem kept getting worse, so I broke out OmniDiskSweeper. It didn’t find anything unusual, except it showed that the totals for the main folders added up to about 90 GB less than was reportedly used on SSD. Disk Utility showed that there were no snapshots taking up space. There must be real files but not ones that the app could see.

I relaunched OmniDiskSweeper using sudo, and it found a huge amount of stuff hidden in the root account: /private/var/root.

I had thought that wasn’t really used except when running Terminal from macOS Recovery. But apparently various daemons store all kinds of stuff there now. The /private/var/root/Library/Logs folder alone was using 74 GB, and there were also several multi-GB cache folders.

The logs were almost entirely from RTCReporting, and I’m not the only one to run into this.

I deleted the files using OmniDiskSweeper, but that didn’t help. It turns out that by default it moves files to the trash, and I guess since it was running under sudo this meant the invisible trash folder for the root account. It’s better to hold down the Option key to Delete Immediately.

After deleting the files and restarting the Mac, the free space looked right at first but then steadily dropped. Pretty soon there were again 5 GB of RTCReporting logs with the Mac just sitting there. I started using sudo du -h -d 2 /private/var/root/ to track how the sizes were changing. Within a day it was back up to 27 GB.

Activity Monitor showed that rtcreportingd and fileproviderd were each using almost 100% CPU constantly. I immediately suspected Dropbox because it had been working poorly on this Mac for a year or so. It wouldn’t keep files offline and constantly seemed to be syncing even when files weren’t changing. Sure enough, turning off Dropbox stopped the CPU use and the ballooning log files.

This was our last Mac still using Dropbox, so it seemed time to migrate it to iCloud Drive. The syncing problems ended up not being limited to keeping files offline. It couldn’t even reliably download most of them from the cloud to move them out of the Dropbox folder, instead reporting I/O errors for most files. And the files that I did move to the Documents folder never synced that deletion up to the cloud. I ended up just downloading the whole folder from the Web interface. iCloud Drive uploaded everything quickly and then settled into a state of no CPU use.

Previously:

• Sunsetting Maestral
• When Dropbox Spawns a Million Folders
• Tahoe Free Space Problems
• Fixing “Optimize Storage”
• Update on Cloud File Provider Extensions

Rui Carmo:

Apple Mail is the first app open every day and the one I find hardest to defend, and I’ve been defending it for twenty years (longer if you remember the original NeXT mail client).

The broader story is one of abandonment.

[…]

Apple deprecated that API, replaced it with a (much more restrictive) MailKit surface in 2021, and proceeded to lock MailKit down so hard that barely anyone shipped an extension.

[…]

In particular, in this age of desktop AI agents, I come time and again across the fact that AppleScript support in Mail has been left to rot.

[…]

And searching for messages is such a mockery of a user experience that I’m not even sure how to describe it[…]

Watts Martin:

The last email program I truly loved was Bare Bones’ Mailsmith.

[…]

Now, I’ve tried a lot, like, a lot, of “modern” email clients. The built-in Apple email client is extremely straightforward, but underpowered. Thunderbird is too lumbering and heavyweight for what I want. Hipster ones like Spark are pretty, but focus on things I don’t care about. Mimestream is solid, but it’s Gmail-only. Microsoft Outlook is, unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook. MailMate is nerdy and, in some ways, the most obvious spiritual descendant of Mailsmith, but I find some of its UX inscrutable. Yes, I am aware of the irony of saying this just before describing an Emacs-based client.

And increasingly, commercial email clients are expensive and/or subscription-only.

Nick Heer:

I almost never use Mail on iOS 26. I just tried to insert an image from my photo library, and I could not figure out how to get back to seeing a keyboard. What a bizarre workflow. Still shocked some of this stuff shipped.

Rosyna Keller:

I haven’t been able to use Mail on macOS since macOS 15.4. It hangs on launch if any accounts are enabled. It feels like it’s been so many years since I filed feedback with sample logs and still Apple hasn’t fixed the hang.

Helge Heß:

I wonder whether I will ever see a time where Mail clients report accurate unread counts (spoiler: clicking on Inbox shows no new mall)

Well, I guess most other mail clients, Thunderbird or Outlook, get this right. But it never worked in any of the Apple mail clients. Like for decades now 🙃

Rishi Ó summarizes the promises for Mail later this year:

• Improved Top Results

• More reliable search indexing

• Improved unread badge accuracy

• Improved list formatting

Juli Clover:

iOS 27 has an overhauled search system that extends to the Mail app. Instead of surfacing results based on keywords and recency, Mail app search ranks results by relevance and intent.

I never found the problem to be relevance ranking but rather that it simply didn’t find certain messages at all.

Long press on any email and you can ask Siri to summarize, find an item in the email, track a package, get a flight number, save a photo, and more.

I guess that’s fine, but as Carmo notes there’s just a whole list of basics that need attention in iOS Mail.

Messages in Mail load faster, search indexing is more reliable, and unread badges between platforms like iOS and macOS sync more reliably.

Rayn Jones:

Mail search is still garbage in iOS 27. 😞 It’s just not better like they claim.

Previously:

• The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook
• MailMaven 1.2
• Golden Gate Spotlight
• GyazMail 1.8
• MailMate License Model: One Year Later
• Mail Extension Postmortem
• Spark Switches to Electron and Subscriptions

Jeff Johnson:

Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds, I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at me. In this case, I was looking at the list of top paid Safari extensions in the Mac App Store, because two of my own extensions are currently on the list, when I noticed the TabControl Extension.

[…]

The Mac App Store “screenshot” for the app is not actually a screenshot at all. If you look closely, that’s not the real Safari: the toolbar elements are wrong. I suspect that the image was AI-generated.

[…]

Another thing you should note in the fake screenshot is the “4.9 out of 5” stars, giving the impression that this is the App Store user rating of the app.

[…]

These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. […] If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. […] the dates on the reviews, such as “Mar 12,” predate the release of TabControl Extension in the App Store!

John Gruber:

God only knows what this obvious AI slop scam is doing with the data from users’ Safari tabs. It’s currently the 12th or 13th most popular Safari extension in the App Store.

Jeff Johnson:

Coincidentally, on the same day well-known developer Marco Arment complained on social media that his new, unreleased Mac App Store app had been waiting 12 days for review by Apple.

Arment ended up waiting on hold—listening to an odd choice of music—to talk to App Review, which I didn’t realize was an option. His Unforgetful app is now approved.

Johnson continued browsing Safari extensions in the store:

The apps’s privacy policy is again on Google Drive, but the developer website link goes to https://aee5e5015.app-ads-txt.com, a suspicious URL. This website is barren and simply redirects back to the App Store[…] Did App Store review ever bother to click the developer website link?

[…]

In addition to the 41 apps, each of which required at least one submission to App Store review, I count across those 41 apps at least 327 updates, almost all of which have the same generic description for what’s new in the update: "Bug fixes and performance improvements." So that’s at least 368 submissions to App Store review, most within the past 12 months, from a single developer. In other words, the developer is averaging almost one submission per day. We can count only approved submissions; we have no idea how many submissions by the developer were privately rejected by App Store review.

I get the impression that Apple is asleep at the wheel. Is anyone at Apple counting submissions per developer? How many is too many? How many resources is one developer allowed to consume?

[…]

You may view it as a noble, democratic ideal to treat every app developer the same, but in reality this is the path to the crApp Store, full of scams and slop.

John Voorhees:

There’s no doubt that there is spam on the App Store, but the way to remove it is to target the spammers, not new developers, students, and hobbyists looking to build their ideas. I know that being an indie developer isn’t an easy way to make a living, but erecting barriers to submitting apps is the surest way to starve Apple platforms of fresh, innovative ideas.

John Voorhees:

I’d like to see App Store spam cleaned up as much as anyone, but the way to do it isn’t preferring well-known developers and those who can afford to pay more for special treatment.

Marc Palmer:

I don’t agree with paid tiers either. However it feels like there should be a natural brake applied to new developers and new apps. It’s no big deal if your first app takes a week or two to review (often did 10y ago), and as it matures & receives meaningful updates in the store, turnaround increases as trust and “value” (active users?) builds up. Like “tarpitting” new accounts. I think limiting the # of new apps you can add per month to say 1 or 2 would also help…

Jeff Johnson:

I was a new App Store developer myself ten years ago. My previous article didn’t propose any new barriers for those groups. To be clear, I did imply that no developer, whether new or not, should have more than 40 apps and average a new App Store submission every day of the year. I’m not aware of any prominent developer who has that many. Apparently, checking just now, Microsoft by my count has 38 App Store apps between iOS and Mac, which is a lot but still less than the 41 apps of the developer I discussed in my previous article who is definitely not one of the largest software developers in the world along with Microsoft. I do think it’s reasonable for Microsoft to pay a significantly higher developer fee to have those 38 apps reviewed than a smaller developer pays to have one app reviewed by Apple.

[…]

My contention is that Apple is actually wasting its own resources treating every developer like a potential spammer or scammer, even the developers who are known to be trustworthy, and this wasting of resources makes it harder on everyone, including new developers, students, and hobbyists. App review is grossly inefficient, and it’s clearly failing to scale to the increase in App Store submissions. What I propose is not raising the gates but rather lowering the gates for developers who have already proven trustworthy, so that Apple can focus its review efforts where they’re most needed.

I’m not sure that paying more would help anything. If scams are profitable, surely it would be worth them paying more, and then we’re back to square one. And I don’t want to create another situation like App Store Search Ads where providing poor service makes the revenue numbers go up. But I like the general idea of considering the account’s history, e.g. the way the Discourse forum gradually increases trust over time. It should count for something if you have a long history of following the rules and submitting updates to a small number of apps on a reasonable schedule vs. frequent spamming of submissions that don’t even have real release notes. It would not be fair for Microsoft to be able to cut in line, but giving spammers equal access to the review queue means they’ll use more than their share of Apple’s resources. That also seems unfair. The current system encourages frequent submissions, which also increases the overall load on the reviewers. I think the incentives need to be changed somehow. Maybe each account should get a certain number of “fast” submissions per month or year, after which you can still submit but it goes into a lower priority queue.

William Gallagher:

Even among more legitimate-seeming apps, though, Apple is ignoring clear problems. In AppleInsider research, for instance, we found that many price tiers listed for the “Simply Piano” app bore no relation to what the developer actually charges.

[…]

You shouldn’t have to be the one to investigate apps you want to try. That is the future of third-party App Stores, and that is a future to be fought.

But that future is here with the first-party App Store we already have. And this inability to trust an App Store is here, right now, because Apple will not do what it keeps saying it is doing and what it is charging developers to do.

Previously:

• Dark Hours Rejected From the App Store
• Chrome Browser Default at the Top of the Mac App Store
• Hidden Gambling Apps in Brazilian App Store
• San Francisco Demands Removal of Nudify Apps
• Small Ways the App Store Could Be Improved for Developers
• Mac App Store Review Times Increasing
• Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews

Update (2026-08-20): Eric deRuiter:

I wonder if there is already a separate queue, not for Marco or other established indies, but for the huge companies: Facebook, Spotify, Google, etc.

Jeff Johnson:

Apparently the App Store developer in question saw my article in the news, because the fake App Store reviews posted on the developer’s website were quickly removed, as reported by AppleInsider and confirmed by me. Until yesterday, the misleading “4.9 out of 5 stars” claim remained in the App Store. However, the developer released an update only hours ago with new screenshots that no longer include the misleading claim, thereby erasing all evidence of the previous fraud. Apple approved the developer’s update and, needless to say, did not remove the app from the App Store.

[…]

There are 59 reviews [of Authenticator ℠], 54 of which are 1 star, and 3 of which are 2 stars. Two of the reviews are 5 stars; of those, one is titled “space jam” and goes on to say, “i believe i can fly and touch the sky.” Anyway, the question is, how did the app manage ratings of 4.1 out of 5 when the reviews average 1.2 out of 5? (That’s a rhetorical question. I think we all know the answer.)