Declutter for Android

I was really overwhelmed by my desktop's clutter, because I had so many screenshots on my desktop. This organized over 400 files instantly!

Once set up, this works great to maintian a clean desktop with locations for everything.

Installed soem time ago - but the last few updates to High Sierra appeared to break the app. Have contacted the developer who said they are “working on it”. Their advice - uninstall then install the version available from other sites (v. 3.0). Problem is - it is a demo - and their own pay page is still returning a 404 error. But since I paid for THIS app - they need to get their act together. 15 day demos are no substitute for a working, purchased app.

This is an app that could easily earn 5 stars. Unfortunately, it’s extremely limited in application because it only works according to file type (extension, to be exact). You can’t use filename, tags, date created, owner… or any other file metadata for deciding how to move your files. I don’t know about anyone else, but considering my image files, audio files, documents, etc all end up being organized according to either what they were created for (invoicing, sales, production, followup) or for whom they are (client, internal, family, etc) or where they came from (dragged from Safari, dragged from iMessage, dragged from Mail… saved manually from an app)… going by only file extension is… pretty much useless for me. I reached out to the developer to ask about this limitation and if maybe I was missing some advanced setting somewhere… or if maybe the developer plans to release an update adding other metadata as filter criteria… but days and weeks went by with not even an aknowledgement that my email was received. Totally unresponsive. Functionally, it seems at best like a nifty homework assignment for programming class, although it does have nice styling and presentation. Unless and until I hear some positive news about this app’s capabilities from the developer… it’s going to stay at 1 star.

I impulsively bought this app after it appeared on Product Hunt despite numerous posts question its cost, and before I had decided on why I wanted such an app. All I knew was that I had started with a clean desktop and was open to avoiding the clutter desktop I had before, while eventually going to have lots of stuff landing on it (what I also need are apps to declutter my Documents folder, my Photos folder, my Home folder and my Downloads folder….. But, these days my desktop is much more visible, since I’m not an Enterprise Unix Systems Admin anymore, so I don’t need to fill every pixel of my screens with as many terminal windows as possible (many of which contain screen/tmux and other multiwindow sessions…) Now, I actually want to see parts of my desktop….though in part because I have monitoring apps drawing onto the desktop… At first it seemed to go through some issues, along with whether it was something I had paid good money for or not. Such as the automatic declutter didn’t work, but it tried to upsell to something that would. To eventually it did start working, but now the most recent update, also starts with “Getting Started”, does the pitch on what it does before finally getting to “Launch App”. Why can’t it just launch automatically at login anymore. In addition, to this new annoyance, one problem it has always had, is how to handle file name collisions. In the current state, it’ll report that it cleaned up N files, but nothing moves. And, it’ll keep reporting it cleaned up N files…because those N file names already exist in the various folders. IE: I save my various account statement PDFs to my desktop (where I have an automator action to open then in preview), and later want declutter to file them away… While most incorporate the date into their filenames, there’s a few that just use generic names like “account.pdf” or “Statement.pdf”. (some day I’ll automate moving from from “FinancialStuff” folder to their final location under Documents…) What would be nice is if it would handle them like Finder’s “Keep Both”…though with better consistency (unless what I think is the preferred way is some app doing its own handling of the issue.) The preferred handling would be if it renamed the existing file out of the way to allow the new file to copy in. (similar to log rotations.) While the more common way is an increasing increment rename of the new file. (it would be even cooler if it could rotate to timestamped files….) The preference is whether you want to be able to quickly find the most recent or the original file when you later need to revisit the file….