CleanMy®Phone Alternatives for iPhone in 2026

Sort your reason for leaving before you sort the apps

CleanMy®Phone — usually typed CleanMyPhone, and formerly sold as Gemini Photos — is MacPaw’s iPhone cleaner. It is a well-made app from an accountable company, which is exactly why the reasons for leaving it are narrow and specific, and why the right replacement is decided by which of them is yours.

The paywall is drawn across the wrong feature

MacPaw’s knowledge base documents the permanent free tier as Largest Videos and Screenshots inside Declutter plus Other inside Organize. That leaves duplicates and similar photos — the job most people install a photo cleaner to do — on the paid side, along with blurred photos, video compression and Live Photo conversion. Inside a category you do have, the scan results are fully visible, so what the paywall decides is which categories exist for you at all.

That distinction matters when picking a replacement, because it is a different complaint from “the free version hides what it found”.

The label declares telemetry, not your photos

The CleanMy®Phone US listing declares Identifiers and Usage Data as used to track you, plus an email address, Advertising Data and diagnostics collected but not linked to the user. The media half of the question is answered elsewhere and answered well: MacPaw’s support FAQ states the app scans and processes the photo library on the device and needs no internet connection for analysis, and its safety page states files stay only on the device.

One thing MacPaw never states outright is whether the App Store build strictly requires an account. Everything about the app implies it does not — the Setapp distribution path needs a Setapp account by its nature, and nothing suggests the App Store build does — but an implication is not a statement, and no statement exists to check it against. If leaving over accounts specifically is your reason, that is the one part of the picture the vendor has not filled in.

Anyone telling you CleanMy®Phone uploads your photos is inventing it.

Behaviour on a very large library

Users have reported the app re-scanning the library on launch instead of persisting earlier results, scans that take hours or stall outright, and selection lag during big batch operations that causes accidental deselection. MacPaw ships fixes regularly and several of those complaints may already be resolved, which is why they are dated here and not stated in the present tense.

A fourth reason belongs somewhere else entirely. If you are here because the Gemini Photos you installed became this app, that is a migration and not a comparison, and Gemini Photos alternatives is the page for it.

What are the alternatives to CleanMy®Phone on iPhone?

Five third-party apps and one thing already on the phone. Read the table as a routing table, not a ranking: the correct column to read first is the last one, because every app here beats CleanMy®Phone at something and loses to it at something else.

The privacy column records declarations, not findings, and two rows show why the distinction is worth keeping. Slidebox has never claimed that it analyses photos on the device, and its privacy policy reserves the right to upload photo information to company or service-provider servers — that is a permission the vendor kept for itself, there is no evidence either way about what the app actually does with it, and the table stops where the evidence does. Smart Cleaner’s label declares Photos or Videos as collected, and in Apple’s framework collected means leaving the device; what can be asserted is that the developer declared it, and nothing about what the app transmits.

Which alternative gives you duplicates and similar photos without paying?

PhotoBroom and Remo Duplicate Photos Remover, in different ways, plus Apple’s built-in Duplicates album for exact copies. PhotoBroom locks nothing: all seven categories open, every scan result is visible, and only deletion is metered, at 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos, with the allowance resetting at device-local midnight. Marking a photo as kept is free and never counts against the cap. Remo goes further on paper — it has no paid tier at all, so nothing is metered — and further back in time, since its last iOS release was version 3.6 in August 2021.

That age is the whole trade. Remo’s build predates iOS 16, and therefore predates both Apple’s own Duplicates album and the on-device Vision APIs current cleaners are built on. Cisdem found its similar-photo detection “not effective in detecting similar images”, and users have reported zero similar images found in burst-heavy libraries and a ceiling of roughly a thousand deletions per pass. PhotoBroom’s constraint is the opposite shape: the engine is current and every group is visible, but 50 items a day is a poor fit for a twenty-thousand-photo backlog unless you buy Pro, which removes the cap and adds Auto-Process All Groups.

Swipewipe starts free too, but it cannot be put on that list with a figure attached. Its allowance is metered by time and by advertising, and the specific numbers are quoted so inconsistently across sources that repeating any one of them would be a coin toss — which is why the table above describes the shape of its metering and none of its figures. The free-tier comparison sets all of these against the rest of the category.

Nothing here replaces CleanMy®Phone’s video compression

Nothing on this page, honestly. Compression and Live Photo conversion reclaim storage without deleting anything, and that is CleanMy®Phone’s strongest genuine feature — a capability PhotoBroom does not have in any tier, free or paid, because PhotoBroom never re-encodes media and only deletes it. Slidebox, Swipewipe and Remo have no compression either. Smart Cleaner does compress large files, but users have reported that compression damaged their Live Photos and rewrote every timestamp to the compression date, which destroys a library’s chronological order.

So if you installed CleanMy®Phone because you have 200 GB of 4K video you refuse to part with, this page has no replacement to offer and the correct advice is to keep paying MacPaw. The same holds for the Organize module’s semantic albums — Travel, People, Pets, Food, Documents — which is a curation feature rather than a cleanup one. Nothing else here does it.

How do you leave CleanMy®Phone without losing photos?

Removing the app removes no photos. iOS photo cleaners act on the system photo library and hold no private copy of it, so uninstalling one changes nothing about what is still on the phone. Anything you deleted before leaving sits in the Recently Deleted album for 30 days before iOS removes it permanently; MacPaw’s legacy Gemini Photos FAQ documents exactly that behaviour for its own app, and it is standard iOS behaviour for the rest of the category too.

Billing is the part worth checking twice, because CleanMy®Phone reaches users through two separate channels. A subscription bought through the App Store is managed in your Apple Account subscription settings on the device. A Setapp or Setapp Mobile subscription is a separate agreement with Setapp, and cancelling one has no effect on the other. The two are not even the same kind of relationship: an App Store subscription is billed by Apple and cancelled in iOS Settings, while Setapp is MacPaw’s own service, billed by MacPaw and cancelled there. Users have reported the annual plan’s trial converting as a surprise and slow support responses, which is a complaint pattern that runs across this entire app category and is not unique to MacPaw — but it is a reason to confirm which subscription you actually hold before assuming you have cancelled.

When you should stay with CleanMy®Phone

Some of the reasons to stay are stronger than any reason to leave. If you already pay for Setapp or Setapp Mobile, CleanMy®Phone is bundled in, so its marginal cost is nothing and every alternative here costs more than that. If your storage problem is video-shaped and you want it compressed instead of removed, MacPaw is the only vendor in this set that does that credibly. If you want your library semantically organised as a browsing aid, the Organize module is the feature and nothing else here has one.

If your iPhone cannot run iOS 18, PhotoBroom will not install and the CleanMy®Phone listing states iOS 17.0. And if what you want is an accountable vendor, that is a fair reason on its own: MacPaw is an established Mac software house with a named legal entity, a public newsroom, real support infrastructure and, per MacPaw’s own site, Red Dot design awards for this app in 2024 and 2025. In a category with a documented predatory tail, that matters. For the head-to-head on the axes above, see PhotoBroom vs CleanMy®Phone; if you arrived here searching for Gemini Photos, start with Gemini Photos alternatives instead.