Looking for an AI-powered iPhone cleaner? AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage certainly sounds promising—but does it actually live up to the name? We put it through real-world testing, evaluating it across key categories to see whether it’s genuinely useful or just another overhyped app.
If you’re short on time, feel free to skip ahead to the Final Score. But for a clearer picture, we recommend going through the full breakdown.
Free Version Warning
While AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage makes a strong first impression, its free version comes with strict daily limits. This makes it difficult to properly test the app without upgrading to a paid plan.
If you’re looking for a smoother, truly free experience, alternatives like Clever Cleaner may offer better value—providing more accurate results and full access to features without paywalls or restrictions.
Here’s a quick comparison:
| Category | Clever Cleaner (100% Free) | AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage (Subscription) |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Completely free—no ads or in-app purchases | Free with limits; paid plans start at $11.99/month or $34.99/year |
| Free Access | Full features with unlimited use | Full scan, but deletions capped (10 photos/videos + 2 other items/day) |
| Core Features | • Duplicate & similar photo cleanup (free) • Bulk screenshot removal (free) • Swipe-to-clean interface (free) • Live Photo to still converter (free) • Large file (“Heavies”) finder (free) • Video compression (free) |
• AI Smart Cleaner (limited in free tier) • Duplicate/similar photo cleanup (limited) • Duplicate video cleaner (limited) • Contact merge & cleanup (limited) • Calendar event remover (limited) • Secret vault (paid only) • Compression tools (limited) • Email cleaner & unsubscribe (limited) • Swipe-to-clean (limited) |
| App Store Rating | 4.8 ★ (~42K reviews) | 4.6 ★ (~167K reviews) |
| Download Size | 110.1 MB | 241.6 MB |
| Store Link | Get Clever Cleaner (Free) | Get AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage |
Note: All information in this review is accurate at the time of writing. Features, pricing, and performance may change with future updates. Some data and screenshots were also provided by our QA testing team.
Important: As part of our latest update, we tested AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage on iOS 26, and it performed without any compatibility issues.
Overview
AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage is developed by GRIMLAX TRADE, S.L. and currently holds a solid 4.6-star rating from over 167,000 users on the App Store.
The app claims to leverage AI-powered algorithms to detect unnecessary files, remove duplicates, merge contacts, and free up storage—all with minimal effort from the user. But as always, claims are one thing—real-world performance is another.
AI Cleaner is clearly a popular app—something that’s immediately evident from its strong presence on the App Store.
To better understand its growth, we analyzed data from earlier versions of this review along with our internal tracking. Based on that, we created a simple chart illustrating how its App Store ratings have steadily increased over the past year.
As shown in the chart, the app has more than doubled its total number of ratings in under a year, highlighting its rapid growth and increasing popularity among users.
App Details
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Developer | GRIMLAX TRADE, S.L. |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 |
| Number of Ratings | 167K ratings |
| Free Version | Yes (with limitations) |
| In-App Purchases | Yes ($11.99/month; $34.99/year) |
| App Size | 241.6 MB |
| iOS Compatibility | Requires iOS 15.0 or later |
| Languages | English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish |
Features and Functionality
As always, we’ll start by looking at the feature set alone—not performance. That comes later. Here’s what AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage offers:
AI Smart Cleaner – Uses AI algorithms to identify unnecessary files and optimize storage.
Duplicate & Similar Photo Cleanup – Detects and removes duplicate and visually similar images.
Duplicate Video Cleaner – Finds and deletes redundant video files.
Contact Cleanup – Merges duplicate contacts and removes incomplete entries.
Event Remover – Identifies and clears outdated calendar events.
Email Cleanup & Unsubscribe – Helps declutter your inbox by removing unwanted emails and subscriptions.
Secret Storage – Provides a secure, password-protected space for photos, videos, and contacts.
Photo & Video Compression – Reduces file sizes while maintaining quality to free up storage.
On paper, AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage offers a well-rounded set of tools that cover all the basics of an iPhone cleaner—and then some. Features like Secret Storage, Email Cleaner, and Event Remover aren’t commonly found in every cleaner app, giving it a noticeable edge. Additionally, unlike many competitors that focus solely on photos, AI Cleaner also detects and removes duplicate videos, which adds real value.
Verdict
This is a very solid toolkit. It covers a broad range of items—photos, videos, contacts, and calendar events—going beyond just duplicate photo cleanup. While it’s not the most feature-packed app we’ve seen, it’s well-balanced, practical, and useful for everyday storage management.
We’ll evaluate how well these features perform in real-world use shortly, but for now, based on the toolset alone, it earns a 5 out of 5.
Interface
Moving on to the design, AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage impresses with both light and dark modes, a small but thoughtful feature that makes the app feel polished and adaptable to different user preferences.
The interface is clean, modern, and easy to navigate. Most sections are intuitive, with large icons and clearly labeled tabs like Photos, Videos, Contacts, and Compress, making it simple to switch between tools. The layout is straightforward, and you don’t need much time to figure out how each feature works.
A particular highlight is the Similar Photos list, which lets you view all detected groups at a glance. This makes browsing and managing photos far more convenient—a design choice other apps could learn from. Overall, the interface feels thoughtful and user-friendly.
Unfortunately, this is where the positives start to fade. The photo preview feature is nearly unusable—it’s difficult to open, and when it does load, the layout feels clunky and poorly optimized. Scrolling is another major issue. The app lags noticeably, reminiscent of older Android devices struggling with smooth animations. In our testing, excessive scrolling even caused the app to crash completely.
The app also wastes space in the UI. Large empty margins and decorative lines that serve no functional purpose make the interface feel unfinished, especially on iPhones with larger screens. These small design missteps combine to make the experience frustrating rather than seamless.
Verdict
While the interface initially looks appealing, performance issues hold it back significantly. If scrolling and crashing were resolved, this could have been a 4 out of 5 for UI design. In its current state, however, with major usability flaws, it earns only 2 out of 5.
Note: For iPhone cleaners with better usability, check out our ranking of the best iPhone cleaner apps. If you’re specifically seeking an AI-powered solution, see our list of the best AI-powered iPhone cleaners.
Cleanup Results
Despite the interface problems, the app’s primary purpose is storage cleanup. So how does it perform?
We tested AI Cleaner on an iPhone 15 Pro Max (256GB) with 95% storage used—a device packed with photos, videos, contacts, and calendar data. Here’s what it detected:
-
Similar Photos: 4,655 images (20.4 GB)
-
Duplicate Videos: 64 videos (11.5 GB)
-
Duplicate Contacts: 102 entries
-
Old Calendar Events: 3,452 entries
-
Total Cleanup Potential: 31.8 GB
Impressive numbers on paper—but as we’ve seen with many cleaners, high totals don’t always equal effective cleaning. And in this case, accuracy was a serious problem.
Similar photo grouping seemed almost random, especially for non-people shots. About 90% of the time, unrelated photos were grouped together—different objects, lighting, and compositions were all lumped into the same cluster.
For photos with people, results were slightly better, but still flawed. Roughly 30% of the groups contained different people or inconsistent numbers of subjects. The app also failed to distinguish whether someone was facing the camera or turned away—everyone ended up in the same group, which undermines the usefulness of its AI detection.
At this point, we seriously began to question whether AI Cleaner even uses real AI—or if it’s simply grouping files at random. For an app that proudly highlights “AI” in its name, these results are frankly shocking.
Best Photo selection? A complete disaster. It fails roughly 90% of the time, making automatic cleanup essentially useless. There’s no way anyone should trust the app to delete files without manually reviewing every single suggestion.
The blur detection is just as disappointing. Out of 79 photos flagged as blurry, only one was actually out of focus—a clear sign that the detection algorithms are unreliable.
To make matters worse, the manual Swipe mode is strangely hidden. You can only access it through the Blurry or Screenshots detection sections. This is an odd design choice, since manual review is one of the app’s core tools. Most iPhone cleaners we’ve tested give Swipe mode its own dedicated tab or make it easily accessible. By burying it behind secondary filters, the developers made a feature that should feel central into something frustratingly hard to find.
AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage fails where it counts most. The app shows impressive numbers to make it look like it’s cleaning massive amounts of junk, but in reality, its detection accuracy is among the worst we’ve seen. Automatic cleanup is technically available, but it’s so unreliable that you must manually double-check everything.
Yes, you can free up some space, but only if you’re willing to sift through messy groupings and incorrect detections. For these reasons, we feel a 2 out of 5 rating is fair—it’s not entirely useless, but it’s far from being a truly “smart” cleaner.
Scan Speed
The app is also on the slower side. On our iPhone 15 Pro Max (256GB), a full scan took 44 minutes—and that was after it crashed at the 36-minute mark, forcing a restart. That makes it one of the slowest cleaners we’ve tested.
Verdict: Scanning nearly 256GB of data does take time, but comparable cleaners can handle similar workloads in just a few minutes. The combination of long scan times, instability, and performance issues earns AI Cleaner another 2 out of 5 for scan speed.
Pricing and Free Version
In terms of pricing, AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage is similar to other apps in its category. You can subscribe for:
-
$11.99 per month
-
$34.99 per year
While not unusual for a cleaner app, the monthly price is slightly higher than many competitors. Considering the app’s performance issues and unreliable cleanup, the cost feels harder to justify. It’s on the steeper side, especially given that there are more accurate alternatives available at lower prices.
Regarding the free version, AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage follows the typical paid-cleaner model: it restricts access with limitations. Like many apps in this category, certain features are locked behind a paywall, and the amount of data you can clean each day is capped, making it difficult to fully test the app without subscribing.
Instead of completely blocking features, AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage imposes strict daily limits: you can delete only 10 photos or videos per day, and for everything else—contacts, events, etc.—just 2 items per day. While better than no free version at all, these limits make it nearly impossible to fully test the app without subscribing.
In our view, a more effective approach is what many other cleaners do: let users unlock additional actions by watching ads. Even with ad interruptions, you could remove far more clutter than these restrictive daily limits allow.
Verdict on Pricing & Free Version
The app sits on the pricier side, but the pricing itself isn’t unusual for this category. The bigger issue is performance: you’re paying the same—or even more—than you would for top-tier cleaners, but the experience and reliability fall short. The free version’s strict daily limits prevent meaningful testing, and any serious cleanup requires a paid subscription.
We’ll give it a 3 out of 5 here—it’s not the worst deal, but it’s far from the best.
Final Score
Here’s a quick recap of our ratings:
-
Features & Functionality: 5/5 – Broad toolset covering photos, videos, contacts, events, compression, and secret storage. -
Interface: 2/5 – Visually appealing, but lags, crashes, and poor usability hold it back. -
Cleanup Results: 2/5 – Detection accuracy is among the worst we’ve seen. -
Scan Speed: 2/5 – Extremely slow, with crashes mid-scan. -
Pricing & Free Version: 3/5 – Standard pricing, but limited free version and underwhelming performance drag it down.
Final Score: 2.8/5
Bottom Line: AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage has the tools you’d expect from a top-tier iPhone cleaner—photo, video, and contact cleanup, event removal, compression, and secret storage. But in real-world use, it fails to deliver. AI detection is unreliable, Best Photo selection is a disaster, scans are painfully slow, and the app crashes frequently. Even though pricing aligns with competitors, the value just isn’t there.
If the developers improve AI detection, fix crashes, and speed up scanning, it could become a contender. As it stands, however, we cannot recommend it—there are far better options available.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
-
Feature-packed
-
Dark mode available
-
Automatic cleanup available
-
Duplicate video detection (not common in all cleaners)
Cons:
-
Terrible AI detection
-
Best Photo selection unreliable
-
Very slow scanning
-
Free version too limited
-
Overpriced for what you get
-
Some tools hidden in unintuitive places