10 Best iPhone Storage Cleaner Apps in 2026 (Including Completely Free)

Finding a good iPhone storage cleaner can take some trial and error, especially with so many similar-looking options on the App Store. To make the choice easier, we tested and compared popular cleaners based on how well they free up storage, their features, ease of use, and overall value. Below, we’ve narrowed them down to the 10 best iPhone storage cleaner apps you can download in 2026, with both free and paid options included.

Quick Summary

First, here’s a quick recap of the 10 iPhone storage cleaner apps that made our list.

We ended up with a pretty wide mix here. If you’re looking for a free iPhone cleaner without subscription, there are a couple of solid choices. If you don’t mind paying for a subscription to get more features, there are options for that too.

*these iPhone cleaning apps’ rankings are relevant as of this article’s latest update.

In the ranking below, we’ve tried to look back not only at the popularity of the specific apps. We also took into consideration other factors such as app performance, personal experience, and user reviews to make sure that the selected tools are the most effective ones on the market.

What to Expect from a Modern iPhone Storage Cleaner?

Before you download an iPhone storage cleaner, you have to know what these apps can actually do. Despite what some App Store descriptions might suggest, they don’t have unlimited access to everything stored on your iPhone. iOS restricts what third-party apps can access, so most cleaners work mainly with your photo library and other data you give them permission to use.

What They Can Really Do

Depending on the app, an iPhone storage cleaner can help you:

• Find exact duplicates and group similar-looking photos together, so you don’t have to go through thousands of images one by one.
• Sort out large photos and videos that take up the most space and make it easier to decide what you can remove.
• Separate screenshots, blurry photos, old screen recordings, and other unwanted media from the rest of your library for a quicker cleanup.
• Compress large photos and videos when you want to save space without deleting them completely.
• Convert Live Photos into regular still images by removing the short video portion while keeping the photo.
• Clean up other types of data, depending on the app. Some cleaners can merge duplicate contacts, remove old calendar events, or help clean up email.
• Make the whole process faster with automatic grouping, smart selections, and swipe-based photo review.

Limitations and Risks

There are also a few things you shouldn’t expect from an iPhone cleaner:

• Third-party cleaners can’t scan and clean everything stored on your iPhone. iOS limits their access to system files, data inside other apps, and other protected parts of the device.
• They can’t freely clear system data or caches created by other apps. Claims about removing hidden system junk or deeply cleaning iOS should therefore be treated with some skepticism.
• Cleaner apps don’t create additional storage out of nowhere. The space they free comes mainly from files you delete or media you compress.
• iPhone cleaners can’t permanently delete photos or videos from your device. Anything they remove from your photo library is moved to the Recently Deleted album in the Photos app.

10 Best Cleaning Apps for iPhone

Here’s a look at our top picks for the best clean up app for iPhone. We tested far more cleaners than the 10 included here and narrowed the list down based on their cleanup features, accuracy, ease of use, performance with large photo libraries, and overall value. The final ranking reflects how each app performed in our hands-on testing, with the highest-scoring options appearing first.

1. Clever Cleaner

Best for: Complete photo and video library cleanup

Clever Cleaner: AI CleanUp App impressed us enough to put it at the top of our list. It offers generous daily limits for free use, with no ads and no locked features. Its duplicate/similar photo detection is among the best we’ve tested. On top of that, you get smart storage savers like video compression and Live Photo conversion. Since our previous round of testing, the app has received a major update, with a redesigned interface and more functionality. You can now compress photos as well as videos, sort results by size or date across different tools, and clean up your media with swipes. The app feels fast and responsive, with a layout that’s easy to follow (everything is clearly labeled and color-coded). Most importantly, it always shows exactly what will be removed and how much space you’ll get back.

Clever Cleaner tends to get high marks from reviewers. Since we first featured it in this article, it has even generated a discussion thread reviewing it in our own community forum, and it pops up regularly in YouTube videos, for example:

Notable features:

• Duplicate/similar image detection (advanced AI scanning)
• Large video detection for easier cleanup
• Unnecessary, old, and large screenshot cleanup
• Live Photo compression (converts Live Photos into still images) or deletion
• Photo and video compression with multiple compression levels
• Swipe-based photo and video cleanup (swipe right to keep, left to delete)
• Batch deletion
• Smart Cleanup for removing duplicates and compressing screenshots and Live Photos in one tap

Personal Experience: Clever Cleaner works exactly as promised. Its AI-powered algorithms are sharp and accurate. When scanning for similar photos, it automatically picks the “Best Shot” to keep, so you don’t have to sort through dozens of nearly identical images. Live Photo “compression” works flawlessly, though we would call it a “converter”—it turns Live Photos into still images by removing the short clips that accompany them; it leaves behind a normal high-quality photo with no loss in resolution.

The Videos tool is another great feature. It lets you quickly pinpoint the videos taking up the most space and either delete them or shrink them down using the Compression tool. You can choose between Optimal, Medium, or Max compression, depending on how aggressive you want to be. Compression isn’t limited to videos anymore, either—you can use it for regular photos and screenshots as well. We also liked that the cleanup tools let you sort files by size or date, which makes it much easier to find the largest or oldest media first.

There’s also a Swipe mode, which a lot of people prefer when they want to review files one by one. You can pick a month and work through your media with swipes, or jump into ready-made groups such as Recents and Favorites, as well as specific media types like screenshots, Live Photos, and videos.

Smart Cleanup takes things a step further when you don’t want to review everything manually. With one tap, it removes duplicate and similar photos while keeping the Best Shot from each group, and compresses screenshots and Live Photos. In our test library, this feature alone cleared about 19 GB of storage. Despite all these additions, we found the free version generous enough for regular cleanup, and Swipe remains unlimited.

App Store User Opinion: Clever Cleaner is one of the highest-rated apps in this category right now. Most people praise how accurately it picks the best photo, how fast cleanup feels, and how much space it frees without forcing you to watch ads or pushing you into a paywall.

The developer has kept its promise to early users. Those who downloaded Clever Cleaner before premium plans were introduced received unlimited lifetime access and can continue using the app without daily limits or a subscription. New users can still use the app for free thanks to generous daily limits, with a subscription available for those who want unrestricted access.

System Requirements: iOS 16.0 or later

Price: Generous free version with daily cleanup limits. Once you reach the daily limit, you can choose one of the available subscription options or wait until the next day to continue cleaning for free.

2. Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner

Best for: All-in-one iPhone cleanup

Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner is an iPhone app with an impressive almost 707K user ratings on the App Store. Like most cleaners in this category, it focuses mainly on cleaning up the photos and videos in an iPhone’s gallery. The app can easily detect and remove duplicates in the gallery, merge duplicate contacts, and clean your mailbox.

It also comes with a few fun extra features that allow you to create custom widgets for your iPhone and set charging animations that will make your device lock screen stand out.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Duplicate file detection (photos, videos, contacts)
• Mailbox cleanup
• File sorting
• Contact merge suggestions
• Custom widgets for the Home Screen
• Charging animations for the Lock Screen
• Video compression and Live Photo to still image conversion
• Swipe-based photo cleanup
• Optimize Storage that automatically selects the best items among duplicates, similar photos, screenshots, and videos, and prepares the rest for one-tap deletion

Personal Experience: In everyday use, Cleanup feels capable and fast. Scans complete quickly, even on large photo libraries, and the app does a good job surfacing obvious clutter right away (duplicates, similar shots, and oversized videos). The video compression tool stood out during testing. It consistently reduced file sizes without visible quality drops, which made it easy to reclaim space without second-guessing the results.

We also liked how much control the app gives you. Nothing gets deleted automatically, previews load fast, and the swipe-based review mode makes sorting feel more deliberate.

App Store User Opinion: Most of the users’ reviews claim that CleanUp is a valuable tool for decluttering their iPhone storage and organizing the gallery. However, some claim that the subscription model is a bit expensive. Also, some users have pointed out that the app needs some improvements in accuracy when scanning for duplicates.

System Requirements: iOS 15.0 or later

Price:

• Free 7-day trial
• Weekly subscription ($11.99)
• Lifetime ($49.99)

3. Boost Cleaner – Clean Up Smart

Best for: Cleaning photos, videos, contacts, and calendar data

Boost Cleaner – Clean Up Smart comes next on our list. This iPhone storage cleaner keeps things simple. It lets you find and remove similar photos, videos, and screenshots, merge contacts, and even tidy up old or unused calendar entries that tend to get overlooked.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Similar photo, video, screenshot, and Live Photo detection
• Large video detection and compression
• Duplicate contact merging
• Calendar cleanup
• Storage overview with cleanup suggestions
• Photo and video compression

Personal Experience: Boost Cleaner was easy to use, and finding the right tools didn’t take any effort. While duplicate detection wasn’t perfectly accurate and missed some similar items, it made up for that by scanning beyond photos. It also checks videos and screenshots, which helped free up space in areas other cleaners often ignore.

Overall, Boost Cleaner did a good job in clearing out some storage space on the iPhone.

App Store User Opinion: It was difficult to locate many positive user reviews. Many users claim to have experienced technical issues and expressed concerns about subscription management. But in general, the app users are satisfied with the performance.

System Requirements: iOS 15.0 or later

Price:

• Free 3-day trial
• Weekly subscription ($6.99)
• Monthly subscription ($14.99)
• Yearly premium subscription ($49.99)

4. CleanMy®Phone: Cleanup Storage

Best for: Photo library organization

CleanMy®Phone: Cleanup Storage evolved out of Gemini Photos: Gallery Cleaner, a gallery management tool that helped iPhone users organize their photos and videos. Now, it’s a fully-fledged storage cleaning app. This tool will scan the library and remove duplicates, old screenshots, photos of text, blurry pictures, etc. Moreover, the app monitors your new files to make sure that the photos and videos don’t pile up again and cause your iPhone to run out of space.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Duplicate and similar photo detection
• Clutter cleanup
• Blurry photo and low-quality image detection
• Photo Radar that monitors new photos over time
• Smart gallery organization
• Large video detection
• Similar contact detection and merging
• Mailbox cleanup
• Video compression
• Live Photo to still image conversion

Personal Experience: After our testing, we can say without doubt that CleanMy®Phone is a good tool for decluttering photos on your iPhone. It quickly scanned our library with almost 20K photos and removed most of the clutter. More recently, the app has also added tools for merging duplicate contacts and cleaning up your mailbox, although its main focus is still on photos and videos.

One thing we particularly liked is that whether you’re in the Declutter or Organize section, you can view information about individual photos and videos, add them to Favorites, or move them to an album. These changes sync with the Photos app, so you can organize your library without having to switch back and forth between the two apps.

App Store User Opinion: CleanMy®Phone: Storage Cleaner is a highly spoken-of tool for decluttering photos on iPhone. Users find it easy to manage the Library on their phones with this tool and love its efficiency. However, some were disappointed with the one-time purchase cost.

System Requirements: iOS 17.0 or later

Price:

• Free 3-day trial
• Monthly subscription ($9.99)
• Annual subscription ($44.99)
• Lifetime ($99.99)

5. Easy Cleaner.

Best for: Contact cleanup and organization

If you’re looking for a free iPhone cleaning application, Easy Cleaner. would be a great choice. This app isn’t designed for cleaning up your photo library, though. It targets your contacts (scanning for duplicates and merging them). It can also detect when your contacts have missing information, such as email addresses, names, and more. Admittedly, you won’t be freeing up lots of space on your iPhone, but you’ll be able to keep your list of contacts tidy and clean.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Duplicate contact detection
• Contact merge and bulk deletion
• Identification of incomplete contact entries
• Create, edit, and delete contacts directly in the app

Personal Experience: This tool was easy to use and was capable of successfully detecting and removing duplicate contacts. If your main goal is getting your contact list under control, this is the app to use. It’s the best free iPhone cleaner app we’ve tested specifically for contact cleanup, with no distractions and no push to upgrade. Just keep expectations in check – this is all it does, and it does nothing beyond contacts.

App Store User Opinion: The Easy Cleaner app has high ratings due to its straightforwardness and capabilities. Most users are satisfied with the contact duplicate detection and removal results. However, some users have experienced issues with the deleting of the Notes section when merging duplicate contacts.

System Requirements: iOS 15.0 or later

Price: free

6. Slidebox: Photo Cleaner App

Best for: Organizing your photo library with maximum control

Slidebox is an iPhone photo Cleaner & album organizer application. It can help you sort your photos into different albums and delete the ones you no longer need. However, unlike many previous app on this list, it leans more toward hands-on organization rather than automatic scanning or AI-driven cleanup.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Manual photo sorting into albums
• Photo deletion
• Undo option for recent actions
• Distraction-free interface

Personal Experience: If you only need to tidy up the Photos app on your iPhone, Slidebox is a good option. We liked how you can easily delete unwanted photos from the application and the organizational capabilities of the tool. Also, it’s nice that you can quickly undo an action if you change your mind about deleting a photo.

App Store User Opinion: Overall, users find Slidebox simple yet brilliant for photo organization on iPhones. They pointed out how easy it was to navigate the tool, and most of the users were happy with the results. Some suggested that to make this app better, it’s a good idea to add a video sorting feature.

System Requirements: iOS 15.0 or later

Price:

• Free 3-day trial Weekly subscription ($1.99) Annual subscription ($22.99) Lifetime ($34.99)

7. AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage

Best for: AI-powered photo and video cleanup

AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage, like many cleaners, uses AI to identify wasted space such as similar photos and blurry images, and it makes sure you notice that by putting AI right in the name. But duplicate file cleanup isn’t the only thing it does.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• AI duplicate photo and video removal
• Contact cleanup
• Email cleanup
• Calendar event removal
• Secret Space for storing private files
• Photo and video compression
• AI Smart Cleanup for photos, videos, contacts, and calendar events in one tap

Personal Experience: The app is very pleasant to use—it’s quick, no fuss, and delivers results fast. The app’s layout is simple and easy to navigate. Its AI detection could be more accurate though, as it sometimes misidentifies similar photos or contacts that shouldn’t be merged. But considering everything it offers—duplicate removal, contact cleanup, event deletion, and file compression—it’s one of the most feature-packed storage cleaners available. The contact merger worked well in most cases, though we double-checked before approving changes. The photo compression tool was another highlight, it can free up a lot space without noticeable quality loss.

App Store User Opinion: AI Cleaner has received over 170,300 ratings with an average score of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Users appreciate its fast cleanup features, with many highlighting the duplicate photo and contact merging as major time-savers. However, many users found the subscription model expensive, and a few mentioned occasional issues with AI misidentifying files, points we also noticed.

System Requirements: iOS 15.0 or later

Price: 

• Free download with limited features
• Monthly subscription ($11.99)
• Annual subscription ($49.99)

8. Cleaner Neat: Clean Up Storage

Best for: Photo and video cleanup with photo enhancement

Next on our list is Cleaner Neat: Clean Up Storage. The app gives you access to most of its cleanup tools right from the main screen, with separate options for similar photos, duplicates, similar videos, similar burst photos, and Live Photos. This makes it easy to jump straight into the type of media you want to clean instead of scanning the entire library first. On top of that, it includes a few extra tools that aren’t strictly about storage.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Duplicate and similar photo detection (including live)
• Similar video detection and cleanup
• Screenshot cleanup
• Video compression
• Duplicate and incomplete contact cleanup
• Contact backup before cleanup
• Private photo gallery for sensitive files
• Home screen photo widgets
• AI photo editor for enhancing photo quality

Personal Experience: The tool did a quick job of locating the duplicate photos on the iPhone; though accuracy was hit or miss when it came to “Best Photo” selection (we often disagreed with which image it chose to keep). Exact duplicates weren’t an issue, and video compression worked well. Some extras, like AI photo enhancement, felt tacked on and didn’t add much value in our experience. Maybe not the best iPhone cleaner app on our list, but it’s still a solid option overall.

App Store User Opinion: Most of the users claim that they had no difficulties navigating the Phone cleaner app and were able to easily remove duplicate photos. However, a few had some challenges when dealing with a large photo library.

System Requirements: iOS 15.5 or later

Price:

• Free 3-day trial
• Weekly subscription ($7.99)
• Annual subscription ($49.99)
• Lifetime purchase ($119.99)

9. Cleaner Kit – Clean Up Storage

Cleaner Kit is another iPhone storage cleaner application that’s quite popular on the App Store, and it’s easy to see why. True to its name, it feels more like a toolkit than a single-purpose cleaner.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Duplicate and similar photo and video detection
• Swipe-based photo review
• Automatic cleanup
• Video compression
• Email inbox cleaner with sender-based grouping
• Contact cleanup and duplicate merging
• Calendar cleanup
• Secure storage for sensitive files
• Extra tools like charging animations, widgets

Personal Experience: In real use, Cleaner Kit is one of the more capable “all-in-one” cleaners we tested. Once the scan finishes, the results are genuinely useful. It grouped photos and videos intelligently, handled similar videos better than most competitors, and the automatic cleanup worked without us having to babysit every step. The Best Photo selection was also more reliable than average.

The main downside we noticed was scan speed (it’s slow, especially on large libraries) but the payoff comes after that wait. When the results finally load, there’s a lot to work with, and the app actually delivers meaningful space savings.

App Store User Opinion: This application has received mixed reviews from users. Some are saying that this tool has been highly effective in cleaning up duplicate files on an iPhone and are happy with its usability and features. At the same time, others claim that the tool hasn’t always given exceptional results in detecting specific types of photos and have experienced some glitches.

System Requirements: iOS 15.0 or later

Price:

• Free 3-day trial
• Weekly subscription ($6.99)
• Annual subscription ($29.99)

10. Simple Cleaner – Clean Storage

Best for: Photo and video library cleanup on older iPhones

Simple Cleaner is a free cleaning app for iPhone that, despite its name, offers more than just basic cleanup. Though not by much. It’s not a full “kit” app packed with extras, but it covers enough ground to handle what 99% of people actually need.

Download link: App Store page

Notable features:

• Similar photo and video detection
• Photo and video organization by location
• Useless photo and video cleanup
• Manual photo and video sorting options
• Duplicate contact merging
• Secret Space for private photos and videos

Personal Experience: Simple Cleaner felt straightforward and easy to work with. It scanned the photo library quickly, highlighted duplicates and similar files clearly, and didn’t overwhelm us with extra tools. It lacks deeper features found in larger “kit” apps, but that simplicity works in its favor. That said, if you plan to stick with the free version and never upgrade, be prepared to see a lot of ads. A lot.

App Store User Opinion: Users have mixed feelings about the Simple Cleaner application. Some claim the app to be incredibly useful and are happy with how the app cleaned out unneeded photos and freed up space on their iPhones. However, some have noted that the tool didn’t properly find the duplicates.

System Requirements: iOS 12.0 or later

Price:

• Free version with ads
• Weekly subscription ($3.99)
• Annual subscription ($39.99)

How We Test Each iPhone Storage Cleaner

We tested far more apps than the ten included in this ranking. Each finalist was used for at least a week or for the full trial period on the same iPhone 13 with a large photo library containing thousands of photos, 4K videos, screenshots, screen recordings, duplicates, and blurry shots.

We rated each iPhone storage cleaner based on five criteria:

• 🧩 Feature usefulness. We looked at what the app can actually do, with more weight given to useful cleanup tools such as duplicate and similar photo detection, large video cleanup, and media compression. A long feature list alone didn’t earn extra points.
• 🎯 Accuracy and effectiveness. We checked how well each app identified files for cleanup, whether similar photos were grouped correctly, and whether automatic “Best Photo” selections made sense. We also looked at how clearly the app showed what would be kept and deleted.
• 🧭 Ease of use. We considered how easy it was to find cleanup tools, review results, load previews, and see how much storage could be freed before deleting anything.
• 💸 Value for money. We compared paid features with what you can actually use for free. Apps lost points for overly restrictive free versions, excessive ads, or aggressive upgrade prompts.
• 🛠️ Overall behavior. We tested how each cleaner handled a large library and watched for slow scans, crashes, freezes, visual glitches, and other problems during regular use.

We scored each category from 1 to 5 and averaged the results to get the Our Rating shown in the summary table. The final ranking follows those scores: the higher the average, the higher the app appears on our list.

Verdict

Now let’s wrap it up. Based on our testing, Clever Cleaner is the best iPhone storage cleaner on this list. It covers almost everything we want from a photo and video cleanup app: it finds duplicates and similar photos, handles screenshots and large videos, converts Live Photos into still images, compresses photos and videos, and gives you both automatic and manual cleanup options. Its free version is generous enough for regular use, Swipe is unlimited, and there are no ads. If you want one app to handle most of the clutter in your Photos library, this is the one we’d start with.

Slidebox: Photo Cleaner App is a better choice if you prefer to stay in control of every decision. It doesn’t try to automate the cleanup process as much as the other apps on our list. Instead, it gives you a quick way to review photos, delete what you don’t need, and organize the rest into albums. We’d pick it for manual photo library organization rather than automatic storage cleanup.

For a paid alternative, CleanMy®Phone: Cleanup Storage would be our other pick. Its main strength is still photo and video cleanup, with plenty of AI-powered categories for sorting through a large library, plus tools for video compression and Live Photo conversion. It also goes a little further with contact merging and mailbox cleanup. The free version is more limited than Clever Cleaner’s, but if you don’t mind paying for a cleaner, it’s one of the stronger alternatives we tested.

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