Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner Review

Saw mixed user reviews of Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner on the App Store? Not sure whether to try it or if it’s worth switching from your current cleaner?

We think you’ll find an answer here. We’ve spent a lot of time testing it to see how it stacks up, how it performs, and whether it’s worth your time. Stick around for our final score.

Overview

As stated on its App Store page, “Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner makes cleaning your photo library easy, fun & safe.”

This app holds an impressive 4.7-star rating with over 396,000 reviews—the highest number we’ve seen among all the cleaners we’ve tested so far. It offers tools to delete duplicate and similar photos, manage contacts, sort videos by size, and even apply AI-based Best Photo selection.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the key details:

Features and Functionality

Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner comes with a truly impressive arsenal. The list of features is definitely not short and elevates it above most of the competition.

Let’s take a look at what it offers:

• 📸 Duplicates & similar photos – Identifies and groups duplicate and similar images so you can easily remove unnecessary ones.
• 🎥 Similar videos – Finds redundant videos to free up storage without deleting important clips.
• 🖼️ Similar & other screenshots – Helps sort through old screenshots from apps, messages, or saved content.
• 💬 Chat photos cleanup – Detects photos from messaging apps that may be no longer needed.
• 🗑️ Swipe-to-delete (photos & videos) – A quick swipe-based game lets you clean up media files in an interactive way.
• 🔒 Secret Library – A private folder where you can store sensitive photos and videos.
• 📇 Contacts Cleanup – Merges duplicate contacts and removes incomplete or unnecessary entries.
• 📧 Google Email Cleaner – Helps clear out old, unwanted emails directly from the app.
• ✂️ Video Compression – Reduces video file sizes while maintaining high quality to free up space.
• ⚡ Charging animation – Offers custom animations while charging your device.
• 📱 Widgets – Adds home screen widgets for quick access to cleanup tools.

Verdict. We won’t mince words—it’s a 5 out of 5 in terms of features. Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner does it all—it cleans up photos, videos, contacts, and even emails, plus compresses videos to free up space. This feature set easily outshines most competitors. We’ll talk about how these features actually perform in real-world use later, but for now, we’re impressed.

Interface

What we like right from the start is that it has dark mode and automatically adapts to your iPhone’s system theme. It’s a small but welcome touch that makes the app feel more integrated and polished.

However, when it comes to actual interaction with the app, that’s where our experience quickly soured. The functional blocks feel confusing, with no clear separation between them, so the layout look off—even if, in reality, it isn’t.

Another thing that kills the experience is ads. Some can’t be closed for the first few seconds, turning what should be a quick cleanup into an chore. And that defeats the entire purpose of a cleaner app.

Then there are the notifications. If you don’t disable them, expect constant reminders to come back and clean something—even when there’s nothing left to clean. Instead of feeling helpful, they end up being intrusive.

Verdict. While the app looks polished, the actual experience falls short. The layout needs more clarity, ads need to be less intrusive, and notifications should be smarter.

We’ll give the interface a 3 out of 5.

Cleanup Results

So, the experience with the app isn’t the best, but we’re here for one thing—cleaning iPhone storage. So, can we overlook the UI flaws if the app actually delivers?

To test it, we ran a full scan on an iPhone 15 packed with photos and videos to see how well Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner handles cleanup. At first glance, the storage cleanup looked promising, it was able to find a lot of potential waste:

• Duplicates: 12 files (21.55 MB) detected from 24 files (43.1 MB)
• Similar Photos: 1,451 images (3.51 GB) detected from 3,355 (8.13 GB)
• Video Compression: 42.24 GB saved from 84.47 GB
• Total Storage Cleanup Potential: 45.96 GB from 93.03 GB

These numbers sound great, but there’s a major problem—photo grouping is terrible. The app misclassified a lot of photos, with completely different images in the same “similar” category. So, while it claimed we could clean 3.51 GB of similar images, the reality was far less reliable. If we trusted its algorithms and deleted everything it suggested, we would have lost a lot of actual photos that had no business being deleted.

Best Photo selection? Just as bad. The app failed to consistently pick the best shot. We don’t know whether it uses AI like many similar apps claim, but if it does, it desperately needs improvement. In multiple cases, the app chose photos with closed eyes, awkward expressions, or poor lighting as the “best” shot. It misses obvious details that should make a photo better.

The one thing that did work well? Video compression. It significantly reduced file sizes without noticeable quality loss and is probably the best thing about this app in terms of cleaning.

Well, there’s also the gamified way to sort photos—swipe right to keep, left to delete. It works as it should, but that’s no surprise since it’s actually you who does the work. There’s no smart algorithms here—just manual sorting with a fancy interface.

Verdict. Cleanup finds a lot of files, but its very unreliable. It groups unrelated photos together, struggles with Best Photo selection, and fails at similar video detection. While video compression works well, the lack of automatic cleanup and constant ad interruptions make the process frustrating.

We’re giving cleanup results a 3 out of 5.

Scan Speed

The app doesn’t have automatic cleanup, so we couldn’t measure it against competitors that do. But overall, it’s a fast app. Not the fastest, but definitely not slow either.

Verdict. We’re giving scan speed a 4 out of 5.

Pricing and Free Version

As we get closer to the end, let’s take a look at what Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner costs. Like most similar apps, it offers several subscription deals:

• $7.99 per week
• $44.99 for a lifetime license
• Limited-time lifetime offer for $29.99 (available at the time of writing this article)

So, its lowest tier is $7.99 per week—definitely not the cheapest cleaner, as many competitors offer $3–$4 per week for similar functionality. The lifetime license is $44.99, though there’s currently a limited-time offer for $29.99. There are definitely more affordable options out there, but the real question whether it’s worth it? In our opinion, it’s hard to justify the price. The app has a lot of features, but it struggles with accuracy, there’s no automatic cleanup. For this price, we expected better performance.

And how about its free version? Well, all features are available, which is a plus—it doesn’t lock certain tools behind a paywall like some other apps do. But there’s a catch. You’re limited to deleting only 25 items per ad and just 5 without an ad. If you’re willing to sit through ad after ad, you might be able to use it. But being forced to watch 10–30 second ads just to access features completely kills its usability. Instead of feeling like a storage cleaner, it feels more like an ad-watching simulator.

Verdict. It gets 2 out of 5 from us here. We just can’t justify the price or the free version’s usability. The weekly cost is too high compared to competitors, and while the lifetime license is more reasonable, the actual performance of the app doesn’t match the price.

Final Score

It’s time to use the calculator—let’s see what the final score is.

It packs great features but doesn’t execute them well enough to justify its high price. The ads in the free version make it nearly unusable, and the cleanup isn’t reliable enough to fully trust.

It does a great job with video compression, but we think one great feature out of ten is simply not enough to recommend it.

If the developer fixes the issues with photo grouping, improves Best Photo selection, and reduces ad interruptions in future updates, this app could become a solid choice. But as it stands now, it’s hard to justify paying for it.