Avast, the Czech Republican security company, renowned for its antivirus products, has acquired Piriform. If you are a tech savvy Windows user, you may recognize the name, as the developers of CCleaner, the popular browser cleaning, and system cleaning application.
This is the 2nd major acquisition for Avast in recent times, as the company had acquired AVG, also an antivirus maker, back in September 2016.
According to Piriform's announcement,
"Avast will maintain and support CCleaner separately from its current Avast optimization portfolio and will continue to give our customers the attention and service they are accustomed to."
We have to keep in mind that Avast does own 2 similar products, AVG TuneUp and Avast CleanUp, which are premium application, advertised in AVG's and Avast products. And Avast says that,
Our existing performance optimization products, Avast Cleanup and AVG TuneUp, will remain available.
So, it appears that despite being a free system cleaner application, Avast will allow Ccleaner, to co-exist with its premium products.
But if this news upsets you, fret not, because you can save the current installer of CCleaner and continue using it. There is a portable version of the program available as well. If you want to ditch CCleaner completely, we can understand your concern, and we recommend BleachBit as an alternative. It is free, open-source, and can clean your browser data, disk space, and do more.