What memory cleaner software exactly do? [closed]

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You must have seen them as applications on mobile devices and I've been using one on mac OS. I was wondering what exactly memory cleaner software do? Do they free up memory in both ROM and RAM? And isn't this something that can be a standard or a must in order to submit apps for public use?

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I was wondering what exactly memory cleaner software do?

In the best case, they do absolutely nothing. If you're lucky.

Sometimes, they will actually free up RAM by deleting caches or forcing processes out of RAM. The thing is: free RAM is actually bad. RAM is much faster than hard disk, and it is also much more expensive. So, you should be using as much RAM as possible, not as little as possible. Forcing cached data out of RAM to increase "free RAM" simply means that the data has to be re-loaded again from disk. Memory cleaners slow down your system.

In the worst case, the memory cleaner will use the elevated privileges it requires to do its job to do "other stuff" as well, such as reading your address book and sending it off to be sold to spammers, reading your password database and looking for weak passwords, reading your emails and building a psychological profile, etc.

So, if those programs do nothing in the best case, are bad for performance, and are in the worst case trojans, why do they exist at all? Simple: because people keep installing them.

Writing a memory cleaner is one of the easiest ways of making money by selling software because the program doesn't even have to do anything.