Today, those two programs are joined together in a financial matrimony. You
see, Avast announces that it has acquired Piriform. Not only does the
acquired company make CCleaner, but many other solid programs too. In fact,
the rest of Piriform's library -- Recuva, Speccy, and Defraggler -- are
staples of the Windows freeware community.
“CCleaner is a leading brand in the market, used by 130 million people, including 15 million Android users. CCleaner has an extensive and extremely loyal community of tech-savvy users, who need to speed up and optimize their PC and Android experience. Avast will maintain the CCleaner brand of products along with Avast’s existing performance optimization products, Avast Cleanup and AVG Tune Up. With the addition of CCleaner, Avast has dramatically expanded its product offerings in the PC and smartphone optimization market reaching customers around the world who demand faster performance,” says Avast.
Whether or not this deal is good for users remains to be seen. Hopefully Avast maintains the entire Piriform library and doesn’t cancel the development of any of them. The company doesn’t mention any programs beyond CCleaner by name in its announcement, which isn’t a particularly good sign, sadly. While just speculation by yours truly, it wouldn’t be so crazy for Avast to integrate CCleaner into its security software while canceling the standalone program. Time will tell.
