MacPaw acquires The Unarchiver to making it even better

MacPaw acquires The Unarchiver and commits to making it even better

Igor Degtiarenko

Writer and blogger at MacPaw, curious just about everything.

MacPaw just bought the Unarchiver, one of the Top Free apps on the Mac App Store. We’re super stoked about the news. We promise to maintain, improve, and keep it free for everyone.

Now let us tell you the whole story. This week we did something big: we took it upon ourselves to acquire the best unarchiving application on the Mac market. The Unarchiver is an overwhelmingly popular piece of software for dealing with a common problem — different archive formats on Mac. Getting this app to join our portfolio is a huge privilege, we cannot begin to tell you how excited we are about the deal. After all, The Unarchiver is more than just an app, is a whole niche.

As Mac users find out shortly after buying their Macs, macOS is far from perfect when it comes to interaction with, for instance, RAR archives. More often than not, you’re stuck in a clumsy dialog with your friends and colleagues about sending files some other way, because you just can’t view them from the archive.

Dag Ågren, the creator of The Unarchiver wrote it more than ten years ago. He never expected this little utility to make its way to the Top of the Mac App Store and stay there for good, gaining millions of users in a few years.

Dag was excited about the success for quite a while but ten years is a long time to spend on one project. Not so long ago he got carried away with other endeavours, leaving the Unarchiver almost unattended.

When MacPaw team found out that Dag has no time whatsoever to work on the app, we swooped in and seized the amazing opportunity: to keep The Unarchiver alive for the users. Since millions of people love it and rely on it, it would be truly sad to leave the app with no support for the future OS or with no design updates.

MacPaw developers hope to not only maintain, but improve the The Unarchiver. We plan a major facelift and a couple of new features. The app is going to get prettier and we’ll keep it updated for the upcoming macOS. Naturally, it will always stay free for all users. Welcome to the MacPaw family, Unarchiver, we’re going to love you.