Clever Cleaner Review

Are you looking for a new iPhone cleaner? Or do you need to find the right one as you explore apps like this for the first time? Maybe you want a good free option and discovered Clever Cleaner on the App Store or somewhere online. It claims to give your iPhone a proper cleanup at no cost—but does it really deliver? We put it to the test, scoring it across key categories to find out if it’s the real deal or just another app that overpromises.

Overview

Clever Cleaner: Free iPhone Cleaner is a relatively new player in the iPhone cleaning space. It comes from CleverFiles, a developer best known for its data recovery tool, Disk Drill, which has earned a strong reputation in that category. Now, they’re bringing their expertise to storage optimization, with this iPhone app.

On the App Store, Clever Cleaner holds a solid rating, though not as widely reviewed as some long-standing competitors. The app claims to offer a reliable cleanup experience without any paid subscriptions—something that immediately sets it apart from most iPhone cleaners you can find in the App Store.

Features and Functionality

We’ll start with features—what does Clever Cleaner offer in terms of cleaning tools? The app provides four core features:

• Duplicate (and similar) photos cleanup – Clever Cleaner uses AI to identify similar images. Not only exact duplicates like the Duplicate folder in the Photos app, but similar-looking photos. It recognizes images of the same thing or person taken from slightly different angles, with minor lighting differences, or in burst mode.
• Screenshots cleanup – The app quickly locates screenshots and allows you to remove them in bulk.
• Heavies (large files finder) – Clever Cleaner helps spot large videos that take up the most storage. This feature sorts them by size (the biggest ones first) for quick removal—something the native iPhone apps don’t do.
• Live photo compression – Clever Cleaner can convert Live Photos into normal still images. The process removes the short video clip that plays every time you press a Live Photo.

Verdict. Not a bad set of features at all. Duplicate, Similar, and Screenshot cleanup tools are expected in any modern iPhone cleaner, so no surprises there. The Heavies feature is also very useful, and we’ve seen similar tools in other apps—since, sadly, iPhones don’t offer a convenient way to manage large files on their own.

The feature that stood out the most to us was Live Photo Compression—something we haven’t seen in most cleaners. It’s actually a pretty clever addition. If you’ve never changed your default settings, chances are your iPhone has stored hundreds (if not thousands) of Live Photos—each with a short animation attached. Removing that motion clip while keeping the still image lets you free up a lot of storage without losing your photos.

That said, we would’ve liked to see a few more features that are common in other top competitors—like contact cleanup, calendar cleanup, or video compression. But since Clever Cleaner is relatively new, we won’t be too harsh on it. Plus, according to the official Clever Cleaner: Storage cleaner’s site, “Early users will never be asked to pay for upgrades or new features.” So what does that mean? It sounds like they’re planning to add more tools in future updates.

We’ll keep an eye on that, but for now, we’re giving the feature set a 4 out of 5—solid, practical, and with some room to grow.

Interface

Next on our checklist is interface. We’ve tested a lot of iPhone cleaners, and many of them look almost identical, with generic designs that don’t stand out. Clever Cleaner doesn’t fall into that category. It has a distinctive design where each feature is color-coded, so you always know exactly what tool you’re using at a glance.

The layout is clean and intuitive, it’s easy to navigate even if it’s your first time using the app. Unlike some cleaners that bury features behind menus, Clever Cleaner keeps everything front and center. The main tools—Similars, Screenshots, Lives, and Heavies—are displayed at the bottom for quick access. The icons are large, and the overall design feels light.

We liked the trash bin feature, which acts as a safety net before final deletion. It shows the total number of files selected for deletion and their combined size. However, the way it functions feels a bit inconsistent—when clearing trash from the group list, the app first opens the trash bin and then immediately shows a confirmation popup. Meanwhile, inside the trash bin itself, you swipe to delete instead of tapping a button, which slightly breaks UI consistency.

Even with a few minor flaws, Clever Cleaner excels at keeping you in the loop. Every selection instantly shows the number of files you’re deleting and exactly how much storage you’re reclaiming—the number of files chosen, their total size in MB/GB, and percentage of total storage. This level of transparency is a big plus, especially compared to other cleaners we’ve tested that left us guessing about how much space we were actually freeing up.

Verdict. What sets Clever Cleaner apart is that it doesn’t look like just another generic cleaner. Many storage cleanup apps feel like variations of the same template, but this one has its own distinct visual style, which makes it stand out. That said, its color scheme might not be for everyone, and we did notice some minor navigation inconsistencies.
However, these don’t take away from the overall pleasant experience, and we think it’s a solid 4 out of 5.

Cleanup Results

So far, so good. But an iPhone cleaner isn’t just about how many features it claims to have or how slick it looks. The real question is: how well does it actually free up space by removing unnecessary files?

To put Clever Cleaner to the test, we ran it on an iPhone 11 (64GB) running the latest iOS 18 update, packed with hundreds of photos, videos, screenshots, and other storage-heavy files—just like what you’d find on any real-world device. Here’s what it managed to detect as potential clutter:

• Similar Photos: Detected 360 photos, totaling 1.53 GB of storage
• Screenshots: Found 180 files taking up 210,2 MB
• Live Photos: Located 81 files taking up 520,1 MB
• Heavies: Found 10 files, totaling 14.86 GB of storage
• Total Cleanup Potential: 17.12 GB from 631 files

More than 17 GB of potential storage savings on a device that only has 64 GB of total storage is an impressive result. But we’ve been burned before—some cleaners promise to clear up tons of files, only for us to find out that they wrongly mark photos as duplicates or group completely different images together.

So, does Clever Cleaner make the same mistake? Thankfully, no.

Its AI-powered grouping is impressively accurate, it goes toe to toe with some of the biggest names in the category, like Clean Up Storage – Cleaner Kit. In our testing, groups were formed correctly about 95% of the time—which is an excellent result for this type of app. To put that in perspective, 90% accuracy is already great, but 95% means the AI is truly doing its job well. It catches near-identical shots without accidentally grouping unrelated ones, and does so consistently.

The app offers both one-tap automatic cleaning and a more semi-automatic approach where you can review and decide on each individual case before anything is done. We found this flexibility to be a big plus.

As for its “Best Shot” feature, which decides which photo is worth keeping, we’d say it also does well. Of course, photo selection is subjective—what one person considers the best shot might not be the same for someone else. But in our testing, we didn’t see any glaring mistakes. Unlike some other cleaners, Clever Cleaner’s AI never selected photos with closed eyes, awkward facial expressions, or blurry details as the “best” one. While personal preference always plays a role, the app’s choices felt reasonable and well-calculated.

As for screenshot detection, Live Photo conversion, and large video identification, everything works flawlessly. Since these tasks are less complex than grouping similar photos, the app handled them without any issues. One thing we don’t quite understand is why the app calls Live Photo conversion “compression.” Technically, it’s not compressing anything—it removes the short video clip and keeps only the still image. It’s a very useful feature, no doubt, but we think “conversion” would be a more accurate term.

Verdict. Although Clever Cleaner isn’t the most feature-packed app, everything it DOES have works exceptionally well. Honestly, we’d prefer if more apps took this approach instead of throwing in half-baked features just to pad the feature list.

With precise AI-driven photo grouping, reliable best-shot selection, accurate screenshot detection, and a well-implemented Live Photo conversion tool, Clever Cleaner delivers on its promises.

For that reason, we’re giving it a well-earned 5 out of 5 in this category.

Scan Speed

When it comes to speed, Clever Cleaner is one of the quickest cleaners we’ve tested.

The automatic Smart Cleanup process took just 5 seconds on our iPhone (with the app displaying the progress bar), and everything else felt instantaneous.

To put that in perspective—our entire Live Photo library converted in just 11 seconds. If you’ve ever tried doing this manually in the Photos app, you know how tedious it can be. Tap, tap, repeat… With Clever Cleaner, it’s done in a blink.

The same goes for similar photos and large videos—tasks that would normally take minutes or, let’s be honest hours (since the Photos app doesn’t offer a practical way to do this) were finished in seconds.

Verdict. If speed is a priority for you, this app won’t keep you waiting. Easy 5 out of 5.

Pricing and Free Version

Normally, we break down pricing tiers and free version limitations here, but with Clever Cleaner, there’s not much to cover—because it’s 100% free. No in-app purchases, paywalls, or sneaky upsells. None of the usual tricks we’ve come to expect from other cleaners.

At this point, we’ve seen apps that hit you with ads the second you launch them, ads that make you wait before cleaning another batch of files, and even ads that play every time you switch tools. Here? Nothing. Just a clean, seamless experience without interruptions. You get the full experience without spending a dime—a rare find in the iPhone cleaner category.

Verdict. Considering that this app is completely free—with no paywalls, no ads, and a promise from the developer to keep it free for all early users no matter what features they add in the future—we’d honestly give it 6 out of 5 if we could.

But we’ll stick to our own rules and give it a 5 out of 5. This level of generosity is rare, especially in the iPhone cleaner space, where most apps try to charge you for every little thing.

Final Score

We’ve reached the point where we can give you the final score, but first, let’s take a quick look back at how Clever Cleaner performed across different categories.

Clever Cleaner may not have the biggest feature set, but it nails what it does offer—and that’s what truly matters. Add in the fact that it’s completely free, with zero paywalls, no ads, and a promise to stay that way, and it’s easy to see why it scored so high.

Yeah, it has some minor quirks here and there, typical for newer apps, but those usually get ironed out in future updates.

Would we recommend it? Absolutely. If you need a simple, yet effective iPhone cleaner that does the job without any nonsense, this is the best free option out there. And if the developer adds new features in the future without introducing new limitations, we’ll gladly bump up its score even higher.