9 iPhone Cleaner Apps That Really Clean Up Your Device

Finding the best app to clean up iPhone storage has become essential as our devices accumulate photos, videos, and files faster than ever. While iOS offers basic cleanup tools, they often fall short when dealing with similar photos, duplicate contacts, or bulk file management.

The best iPhone cleaner apps can automatically detect redundant content, compress media files, and manage storage more efficiently than native tools. We’ve selected and evaluated the top cleaning apps to help you choose the right solution for decluttering your device.

Quick overview of our favorite iPhone cleaner apps:

Criteria for Selecting the Best App to Clean Up iPhone

With iOS offering built-in cleanup tools, you might wonder if downloading the best iPhone cleaner apps is really necessary. The answer largely depends on how much control you want over your device’s storage management and how efficiently you need to handle bulk operations. If your needs are anything but the most basic, then you’re guaranteed to run into at least some of these limitations sooner or later:

• iOS doesn’t offer cross-app cache cleaning or single-click junk removal, requiring you to clear caches app by app.
• The built-in Optimize iPhone Storage feature provides minimal control over photo and video compression.
• While iOS 16+ can detect duplicate photos, its ability to identify similar images is less than ideal in practice.
• iOS lacks advanced sorting options for finding space-hungry files quickly.
• The system doesn’t offer automatic cleanup scheduling or storage monitoring.
• Native tools can’t compress videos or resize photos while keeping the originals.

Fortunately, you don’t have to rely solely on native features to get more storage on your iPhone because excellent iPhone cleaner apps are available in the App Store.

When selecting the best phone cleaner apps for iPhone, we were guided by the following criteria:

• 🛠️ Features: We picked apps that offer powerful capabilities beyond iOS’s native tools. This includes intelligent photo similarity detection (not just exact duplicates), advanced media sorting and filtering, video compression with quality control, and automated storage monitoring. The best apps can handle bulk operations efficiently and offer cross-feature functionality like combining photo cleanup with contact management.
• 🤑 Value for money: Rather than just comparing price tags, we carefully evaluated what each app offers in both free and premium versions. Many free versions are hampered by aggressive ads or severe feature limitations that make them practically unusable. That’s why we’ve selected only apps that provide meaningful functionality in their free tier while offering premium features that genuinely justify their subscription costs.
• 🧑‍💻 Usability: A cleaner app should simplify storage management, not complicate it. We assessed interface clarity, navigation flow, and operation speed. Special attention was paid to how apps handle file preview and selection to prevent accidental deletions. We also considered the intrusiveness of ads in free versions and how they impact the user experience.
• 🧪 Real-world testing: We personally tested each app’s performance with large photo libraries, numerous contacts, and various file types to verify their capabilities. As time-consuming as real-world testing can be, it revealed how well apps handle edge cases, process large batches of files, and maintain performance under heavy loads.
• 💬 User reviews: Our analysis of the best apps to clean up iPhone also included user reviews and ratings. Of course, we’re well aware that they can be faked, which is why we dug as deep as possible to evaluate not just their content but also their authenticity.

The result of our effort is the following list of the best phone cleaner apps for iPhone, and we sincerely hope that it will help you make your smartphone as organize as you want it to be.

9 Best Cleaning Apps for iPhone

There are so many excellent apps for cleaning your iPhone storage that limiting yourself to just one would be unnecessarily restrictive. But if you really don’t have time to give multiple best storage cleaning apps a try, then you should definitely check out our top recommendation.

1. Clever Cleaner – AI Cleanup App

Clever Cleaner is the ultimate photo and video cleaning app for iPhone because it’s both completely free and impressively powerful considering that it has been released only recently.

By offering it without any ads, subscription plans, or other forms of monetization, Clever Cleaner’s developer (CleverFiles, the company behind Disk Drill) hopes to attract many early adopters, who will be able to keep using the app without paying indefinitely—even if it introduces premium features in the future.

✨ Features:

• Removal of duplicate and similar photos using AI-powered detection
• Compress live photos to save space without losing quality
• Remove heavy files with smart file size detection
• Screenshot management for effortless cleanup
• Smart Cleanup mode for one-tap optimization
• Local processing keeps user data private

💭 Personal Experience: The user experience provided by Clever Cleaner clicked with me from the first moment. The app is divided into four tabs (Similars, Screenshots, Lives, and Heavies), so you can instantly select what you want to clean. The cleaning process itself is frictionless because you always know where to tap next, and it doesn’t take much time at all thanks to the high efficiency of the app’s algorithms. All similar or identical photos are grouped together, and the best photo from each set is automatically selected. I found the automatically selected photo to be really be the best one in virtually all cases.

😎 Best for: Users who are looking for the best free app for cleaning iPhone photos and videos.

🏷️ Price: 100% free with no ads, no subscriptions, and no hidden costs.

2. Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner

Clean up your contacts, photos, videos, and Gmail with Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner. You can remove similar and duplicate photos, delete screenshots, and compress large videos to free up space. You can also use the Secret Library section to store photos and videos you want to keep private.

For some reason, the app includes charging animations that make your device cool to look at when it’s charging. Who knows why this feature is included and accessible from the first tab, but you can safely ignore it if you don’t need it—we doubt the app’s price would be lower without it.

✨ Features:

• See which similar photos are the best to keep and remove unwanted photos with a swipe
• Perform a final review to avoid accidental deletion of videos and photos
• Add private files to the Secret Library
• Clean emails in Gmail by category
• Check out animations for device charging
• Add Home screen widgets for battery and storage

👤 User Experience: Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner is one of the most popular apps of its kind, and the reviews published by its users are mostly positive. There are, however, a few recent ones that mention lags and freezing. Hopefully, this is just a temporary problem and not an indication of where the app is headed.

💭 Personal Experience: While I appreciated the unique swipe-to-delete feature that made cleanup feel almost game-like, and I was genuinely impressed by how well the video compression worked, the core experience was hampered by several issues. I had to sit through unskippable 30-second ads just to access basic features, and being limited to deleting only 25 items per ad viewing quickly became tedious. The photo grouping was also disappointing as I often found it mismatching completely different photos or failing to identify actual duplicates.

😎 Best for: Those who are looking for a jack-of-all-trades iPhone cleaner app and are willing to spend money on the necessary subscription.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone with in-app subscriptions starting at $3.99 that include a free three-day trial.

3. Cleaner Kit – Clean Up Storage

Along with getting rid of duplicates and similar pictures, you can remove photos that are blurred or contain text with Cleaner Kit – Clean Up Storage. As well as decluttering your iPhone, you can perform a speed test, use widgets, reduce video sizes, and hide private files, all with one app.

✨ Features:

• Delete similar photos and videos, Live Photos, bursts, and screenshots
• Merge and remove duplicate contacts
• Get rid of old calendar events
• Compress large videos
• Hide files in the Secret Space
• Add widgets to your Home screen

👤 User Experience: Users have mixed experiences with Cleaner Kit. Many praise its effectiveness in freeing up storage space and managing duplicate photos, but there are also those who have had major issues with customer service responsiveness and unexpected subscription charges, although those can probably be attributed to carelessness.

💭 Personal Experience: Cleaner Kit’s interface is visually appealing with its pleasant color scheme and compact design, though the lack of clear boundaries between functional blocks can feel overwhelming at times. What impressed me the most was the photo grouping accuracy. The app consistently identified the best photo in a set about 95% of the time, even with complex shots containing multiple people. If only the app was a bit faster in terms of scanning speed.

😎 Best for: Users who can appreciate a comprehensive set of accurate cleaning tools and don’t mind a slower scanning process in exchange for better results.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone with in-app subscriptions starting at $4.99 that include a free three-day trial.

4. Phone Cleaner: Clean Storage+

With Phone Cleaner: Clean Storage+, you can do a fast and simple cleanup in just minutes. For photos, videos, and contacts, eliminate duplicates and similar items to regain space. You can also use the quick Clean feature to tidy up your iPhone or iCloud storage in a single tap.

✨ Features:

• Remove duplicate and similar photos
• iCloud storage cleaning capabilities
• Delete unwanted videos
• Merge duplicate contacts and erase contacts with missing details
• Back up your contacts
• Clear app and Safari cache
• Use animations for device charging

👤 User Experience: With 4.6 stars on the App Store, Phone Cleaner: Clean Storage+ certainly deserves to be placed on our list of the best iPhone cleaner apps, but that missing half-star is telling. Users with large photo libraries struggle with the app’s scanning performance and often complain about issues with interrupted scans or the inability to pause the process for review.

💭 Personal Experience: Phone Cleaner is a good example of how one of the best free apps for cleaning iPhone can be made infuriating to use due to intentionally annoying ad placement. The ads are designed to look like functional elements of the app, so it’s very easy to tap them accidentally. Of course, this won’t bother you if you purchase a subscription plan because then there won’t be any ads. Photo grouping accuracy and video handling could also be improved.

😎 Best for: iPhone owners who would like to clean up both local and cloud (iCloud) storage.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone and iPad with in-app subscriptions starting at $3.99 that include a free three-day trial.

5. Boost Cleaner

Clean your photos, videos, contacts, and calendar and then move onto compressing media, performing a speed test, and securing photos, contacts, and browsing. You can easily and effortlessly do it all with Boost Cleaner.

✨ Features:

• Delete duplicate and similar photos
• Merge and delete duplicate contacts
• Clean up contacts with missing details
• Remove or compress large files
• Erase old calendar events
• Secure private photos, contacts, and web browsing to the Vault

👤 User Experience: On one hand, it’s lauded for its effectiveness in managing large photo collections, with some users successfully decluttering over 21,000 photos. On the other, there’s significant discontent with its subscription model. Many reviews highlight how the functionality drops dramatically once the trial concludes, and not everyone is keen on paying $5.99 on a weekly basis just to keep their device organized.

💭 Personal Experience: The initial scan impresses with its speed and thoroughness, but subsequent attempts to clean up newly added photos stalled on several occasions, which took a lot away from the otherwise great first impression. While some of the app’s features require a subscription, you can obtain access by watching a short video ad. This is a great way to check out the premium features before you subscribe.

😎 Best for: Users who need a one-time cleanup of their photo library.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone and iPad with in-app subscriptions starting at $5.99 that include a free three-day trial.

6. Easy Cleaner

If you need to concentrate on cleaning your contacts, Easy Cleaner is the app for you. For free, you can remove duplicates or those with missing information and use filters to find contacts by birthday, company, or job title. Managing your address book to free up space has never been easier.

✨ Features:

• Use filters to find contacts
• Merge and delete duplicate contacts
• Add missing contact details
• Create an address book restore point
• Receive reminders for merging and backing up contacts
• Available in 15 languages

👤 User Experience: Users consistently praise Easy Cleaner’s straightforward approach to contact management, and long-term users in particular appreciate that premium features offered by other paid apps come standard here at no cost. However, some users report issues with contact merging, specifically mentioning that the app sometimes deletes important information from the Notes field during the merge process.

💭 Personal Experience: I was aware of Easy Cleaner’s focus on contact organization when I installed it for the first time, so that’s the lens through which I evaluated it. My favorite feature was Smart Filters, which made it simple to sort contacts by company name and upcoming birthdays. The contact enrichment feature also proved surprisingly useful, but I was annoyed by the app’s persistent tendency to flag shared family phone numbers as duplicates.

😎 Best for: Users seeking a dedicated contact management solution without the bloat of unnecessary features.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone and iPad with no in-app purchases.

7. Phone Cleaner – Clean Up Storage

Phone Cleaner is one of the most comprehensive iPhone cleaner apps out there. The latest version can eliminate everything from photos and videos to contacts and calendar events with one click (paid version only), and it also supports swipe-based manual cleaning (free version). In addition to duplicate cleaning, the app can also save storage space on your device by compressing large video files, and there are even a bunch of extra tools that are not related to phone cleaning.

✨ Features:

• One-click smart cleaning
• Duplicate photo and video deletion
• Clean up duplicate or incomplete contacts
• Secure file storage
• Efficient video file compression
• Email clean up

👤 User Experience: Phone Cleaner is decently well-rated by users to be considered one of the best apps to clean up iPhone. More negative reviews mention mainly stability issues, with a few reports of the app freezing entire phones during scanning operations. However, it’s possible that most such negative reviews come from users with very old iPhones.

💭 Personal Experience: It’s a pleasant surprise that the app does more than clean up duplicate items as the name suggests. You can create contact backups, compress large photos and videos, and manage your contacts with ease. There’s even an email cleaner that can help Gmail users free up valuable inbox storage space. Since I personally don’t have use for all these features, I appreciate that Phone Cleaner works even if you don’t have every single permission it asks for, such as access to your contacts.

😎 Best for: iPhone users who would like to perform a comprehensive clean-up and don’t want to download multiple apps for it.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone and iPad with in-app subscriptions starting at $4.99 that include a free three-day trial.

8. Phone Cleaner – Phone Clean

If basic is best, Phone Cleaner – Phone Clean is the tool you want. Clean photos, videos, or contacts separately where you can do a proper review. Or take advantage of the Super Cleaning feature for decluttering with a tap.

✨ Features:

• Find and delete similar photos, Live Photos, and bursts
• Remove large video files
• Compress large photos and videos
• Merge and delete duplicate contacts
• Backup or transfer files to another iPhone or iPad
• Perform a one-tap Super Cleaning for similar photos, Live Photos, and videos along with screenshots

👤 User Experience: Basic cleaning features offered by Phone Cleaner – Phone Clean receive consistent praise for their effectiveness, but the cleaner is often criticized for its steep pricing. In reality, the pricing of this cleaner is very similar to other cleaners, with completely free cleaners like Clever Cleaner being a rare exception.

💭 Personal Experience: I personally find the user interface of Phone Cleaner – Phone Clean to be rather basic and boring, but there’s no doubt that it’s functional. The basic cleaning features are all executed well, but the five-photo-per-day deletion limit means any serious cleanup requires a subscription. I also don’t like the inclusion of the battery monitor and antivirus because they feel more like window dressing than truly useful additions.

😎 Best for: Users looking to perform occasional, small-scale cleanups.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone and iPad with in-app subscriptions starting at $4.99 that include a free three-day trial.

9. Cleaner – Smart Cleanup

See exactly how much storage space you’ll regain and then clean in one step using Cleaner – Smart Cleanup for iPhone. Take care of photos, videos, and contacts, perform a speed test, and check out Home screen widgets to keep up with your device details.

✨ Features:

• Delete duplicate or similar photos, screenshots, selfies, blurred photos, and bursts
• Remove large video files
• Merge and remove duplicate contacts
• See details about your device
• Perform a network speed test
• Add widgets to your Home screen

👤 User Experience: A quick analysis of the user reviews given to Cleaner – Smart Cleanup is enough to tell us that the cleaner has evolved more over the years than a Pokemon. Unfortunately, the evolution is both positive and negative. The app’s functionality has increased in scope, but more recent feedback suggests a shift toward a more aggressive monetization strategy. Specifically, the removal of the lifetime subscription option seems to be universally disliked, and it’s easy to see why.

💭 Personal Experience: I found the app’s navigation to be just as clean as the job it does, making it super easy to get started. The Smart Cleaning feature is terrific because it takes care of photos, videos, and contacts in one fell swoop and the bonus network speed feature can be nice to have in some situations, but I’m personally a firm believer.

😎 Best for: Users seeking a straightforward cleanup tool that runs on iOS 14.0 or later.

🏷️ Price: Available for free on iPhone and iPad with in-app subscriptions starting at $4.99 that include a free three-day trial.

Conclusion

If you’re ready to clean up your iPhone and regain some storage space, each of the apps on this list gets it done and done right. Peruse the list of features they offer, check out the subscription prices, and see how other users rate the app. Then, hunker down for a few minutes and do some spring cleaning. You’ll be glad you did.

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