Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner Alternatives

This page is about the app at App Store ID 1510944943 — listed in the US as Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner, and as Cleanup: Clean Storage Space on the Turkish and Singaporean storefronts — sold by DEEP FLOW SOFTWARE SERVICES - FZCO with a © Codeway 2020 line still on the listing. At least one unrelated app ships under a near-identical name (App Store ID 1600411716, by BMAC Infotech), so check the numeric ID in the URL before assuming a review, a forum thread or a cancellation guide is about the same product.

How do I cancel a Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner subscription?

Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner is monetised by an auto-renewing App Store subscription, which is why the button you are looking for is not in the app at all. It is in iOS Settings, on the Apple Account that made the purchase:

1. Open Settings and tap your name in the row at the very top.
2. Tap Subscriptions.
3. Find the entry — which may not say Cleanup; see below before you conclude it is not there.
4. Tap the entry, then tap Cancel Subscription, and confirm.

The same list is reachable from the App Store app if the Settings route fails you: tap your profile picture in the top right, then Subscriptions. Either way, the confirmation you want is the entry switching from a renewal date to an expiry date. Apple documents a cancelled subscription as remaining usable until the next billing date, so cancelling the moment you decide to leave costs you nothing.

Why the entry may not say Cleanup

The subscription is listed under the in-app purchase product, not always under the app you remember installing. On the US listing those products surfaced as “Cleanup Pro 1 Week” and “Cleanup Pro 1 Year”, so somebody scrolling a Subscriptions list for the word Cleanup can pass straight over their own charge. The listing’s description compounds it by disagreeing with itself about which plans exist at all: a weekly and a lifetime subscription in one passage, then a seven-day trial converting to the annual plan in another. Read every entry in the list, not just the ones you recognise.

Deleting the app is not cancelling

Removing Cleanup from the home screen removes the app and leaves the subscription attached to your Apple Account, renewing on schedule. That single misunderstanding is behind most of the recorded complaints about this app: dedicated how-to-cancel pages exist for this Apple ID, and people turn up on Apple Support Communities having deleted the app and been charged anyway. If a charge has already landed, Apple handles refunds at reportaproblem.apple.com; the developer cannot process one.

Cancel before you switch, not after. Every alternative below is a separate purchase relationship, and an uncancelled subscription keeps renewing regardless of which app is on the home screen.

Which app replaces Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner?

No single one does, and that is the honest starting point. Cleanup bundles photo de-duplication, email cleaning, contacts merging, video compression, a PIN vault, charging animations and widgets into one product; the apps that do any one of those well mostly do not do the others. The table below reduces to one sentence: if you used Cleanup for its photo and video work, a photo specialist replaces it cleanly, and if you used it for compression, contacts or mail, only another all-in-one comes close.

What replaces Cleanup’s video compression?

CleanMy®Phone, and with a caveat, Smart Cleaner. MacPaw documents video compression and Live Photo to still conversion inside CleanMy®Phone’s Optimize Storage module, and both reclaim space without deleting a memory — the same trade Cleanup’s compression offers. Smart Cleaner also advertises compression of large files, but users have reported that it damaged their Live Photos and rewrote every timestamp to the compression date, which destroys the chronological order of a library. Weigh that before treating the two as equivalent.

PhotoBroom has no answer here at all. PhotoBroom never re-encodes media — it finds oversized and throwaway video and deletes it, which is a different job from shrinking a file you intend to keep. Anyone whose storage problem is “20 GB of 4K footage I am not deleting” should stop reading this section and install a compressor.

What replaces the contacts, calendar and email cleanup?

CleanMy®Phone and Smart Cleaner, and neither is a like-for-like swap. CleanMy®Phone references contacts merging in its App Store description alongside its Health, storage analytics and network speed modules. Smart Cleaner is the broader of the two, covering contacts merging, removal of past calendar events and inbox filtering by label — though users have reported its email cleanup working only with Google accounts despite artwork implying otherwise, and reported lost calendar entries and altered contacts with no visible way to restore them. Back up before pointing either at a contact list.

There is one thing worth knowing about the feature you would be replacing. Cleanup’s Email Cleaner necessarily involves connecting a mail account, and the cleanup.photos privacy policy references collecting email account information with permission. Whether that mail is processed on the device or on a server is not stated anywhere the developer publishes, and we could not determine it. PhotoBroom touches none of this: no contacts, no calendar, no mail, by design.

If you left over the advertising and the tracking declaration, what actually helps?

Two apps, and four that will not help. PhotoBroom shows no advertising to any user, ships no advertising or attribution SDKs, requires no account and no sign-up, and declares no tracking on its App Store listing; analysis runs on the device using Apple’s Vision framework and no media is uploaded. Remo Duplicate Photos Remover’s label declares that the developer collects no data at all, verified on both the US and Canadian listings — the cleanest label in this set, attached to an app whose last iOS release was August 2021.

The four that do not solve the problem are worth naming, because switching to one of them is a lateral move. CleanMy®Phone’s US label declares Identifiers and Usage Data used to track you. Swipewipe’s declares Identifiers, Usage Data and Other Data used to track you, with third-party advertising linked to the user, and its privacy policy names seven advertising networks. Slidebox’s label is milder — everything falls under Data Not Linked to You with no tracking category declared — but its free tier is ad-funded with full-screen interstitials, and its privacy policy reserves the right to upload photo information to company or service-provider servers, which is a permission the vendor has written down rather than evidence of what the app does. Smart Cleaner’s label declares the most: Device ID and Advertising Data used to track you, and Photos or Videos collected for Analytics and App Functionality. In Apple’s framework “collected” means transmitted off the device, but a label is a self-declaration, so the claim here is that the developer declared it and nothing further.

For the detail on how Cleanup’s own declaration compares with its “no tracking” description copy, the head-to-head comparison works through it line by line.

What does PhotoBroom cover, and what does it not?

PhotoBroom covers the photo library in seven categories, including Similar Photos, Screen Recordings and Large Videos with a size threshold you set. Nothing in it is locked and no scan result is hidden; only deletion is metered, and how the free tiers in this category compare puts that allowance next to everyone else’s. Pro removes the daily limit and adds Auto-Process All Groups, sold yearly, weekly, or as a one-time lifetime purchase — which is the plan question Cleanup’s own description cannot answer about itself.

What PhotoBroom does not do is most of why someone installed Cleanup in the first place. No email cleaning, no contacts merging, no calendar, no compression, no PIN vault, no charging animations, no widgets. It requires iOS 18.0 or later, so it does not exist on the older iPhones Cleanup still supports. It is available in 22 in-app languages across 30 App Store locales, against Cleanup’s 18 listing languages, and unlike Cleanup it ships a native iPad build.

What the Cleanup listing does not settle

A page built around cancelling a subscription ought to say where the public record on that subscription runs out. It runs out on the plan shape: the description mentions a lifetime purchase, only weekly and yearly products surfaced on the listing, and the description contradicts itself, so no claim either way about a Cleanup lifetime purchase appears above. It runs out again on who you are dealing with — the copyright line, the developer website and the privacy-policy controller all say Codeway, while the App Store seller field says DEEP FLOW SOFTWARE SERVICES - FZCO, and which of them is the operative data controller today is not answerable from anything published. The third gap is the free tier: the complaints on record are about being blocked from acting on scan results, not about findings being hidden, but nobody here installed Cleanup to confirm which it is.

One methodological note about the alternatives above. Several review sites covering this category are operated by or affiliated with competing cleaner products. Where such a source is used on this page, it is named as a hands-on review and corroborated by at least one independent source before any claim is drawn from it.