PhotoBroom vs Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner

Cleanup here means App Store ID 1510944943, whose privacy policy lives at cleanup.photos. One set of hands-on findings quoted below comes from a review published on a rival cleaner’s blog; that conflict of interest is named again at the point of use.

Is your problem the whole phone, or the photo library?

That question settles this comparison faster than any feature count, because the two apps have made opposite bets. PhotoBroom is a photo-library specialist: seven cleanup categories, Apple Vision analysis on the device, no advertising and no account. Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner — Apple ID 1510944943, sold by DEEP FLOW SOFTWARE SERVICES - FZCO with a © Codeway 2020 line still on the listing — is a breadth play that adds email, contacts, video compression, a PIN-protected vault, charging animations and widgets. The table below reduces to one sentence: Cleanup touches more of the phone and can shrink a video without deleting it, while PhotoBroom goes deeper on the photo library, runs on iPad, and declares no tracking on its App Store listing.

Does Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner track you?

Apple’s product page for Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner declares Purchases, Identifiers and Usage Data under Data Used to Track You, and Usage Data plus Advertising Data under Data Linked to You. The app’s own description contains an “offline and private” passage claiming no internet connection is needed, that no files leave the phone, and that there is “no tracking or data misuse”. Those two statements sit on the same Apple page and do not agree, and both come from the developer: one is a privacy self-declaration published by Apple, the other is marketing copy a few paragraphs above it.

The privacy policy at cleanup.photos backs the media half and undercuts the rest. It states the company does not store contact lists, photos or videos on its servers and that processing is carried out on the device or the user’s own cloud services. It then enumerates identity and contact data, technical and usage data, email account information collected with permission, purchase data and marketing identifiers including IDFA, IDFV and GAID, and names Google, Apple, the Facebook SDK, Adjust and Firebase Analytics among its third parties.

Tumbleson’s teardown, published 13 January 2025, observed live traffic from this app to six or more analytics and advertising endpoints — Adjust, Firebase, Cerebro, Admost, Facebook and Unity Ads — and reported permission prompts for Calendar justified as being “for ad content”, plus GPS and microphone. That teardown describes the build he tested roughly nineteen months before this page was written; the SDK list and the permission strings may have changed since. The privacy label on the listing is the fresher source, because it is maintained on the product page, while a blog post stays fixed at its publication date.

The accurate framing for Cleanup is on-device for your media, ad-tracked as a product.

PhotoBroom’s position is narrower and easier to state: analysis runs on the device using Apple’s Vision framework, no media is uploaded, there is no account and no sign-up, no advertising is shown to any user, and the listing declares no tracking.

Some of Cleanup’s data handling stayed out of reach, and it should not be guessed at. The Email Cleaner has to touch a mail account by definition, but whether it processes messages on the phone or on a server is nowhere stated — the privacy policy mentions collecting email account information with permission and stops there, and the on-device claim covers media, which mail is not. And the operative data controller is genuinely unclear: the App Store seller field reads DEEP FLOW SOFTWARE SERVICES - FZCO while the copyright line, the developer website and the privacy-policy controller all still say Codeway, so it is not obvious which entity answers a data request today.

What does each free tier actually let you do?

PhotoBroom locks nothing. All seven categories are open to every user and no scan result is hidden behind the paywall; what is metered is deletion, at 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos, resetting at device-local midnight. Marking a photo as kept is free and never counts against the cap, so working through a library and deciding costs nothing. Cleanup’s free experience is shaped differently: its description leads with a seven-day trial offering “unlimited gallery cleaning for a limited time”, and advertising funds the free tier alongside it.

Cleanup’s scan results do appear to be visible before paying — the recorded complaints are about acting on findings rather than about hidden findings — but that was not confirmed by installing the app, and it is stated here as an inference. What is better attested is the friction around it. Users have reported that most useful actions are locked behind the subscription, that they were flooded with advertising when trying to use the app without paying, and that a session that started as free ended at a paywall. Subscription cancellation is a documented, recurring support burden around this app, to the point that dedicated how-to-cancel pages exist and users turn up on Apple Support Communities asking how to get out — most often after deleting the app and assuming that cancelled the subscription. It does not: an App Store subscription lives in the Apple account and is cancelled in iOS Settings. The alternatives page answers that question directly.

What comes after the trial is harder to state than it should be, because the listing does not agree with itself. The description names a weekly and a lifetime product in one breath, then describes a seven-day trial converting to the annual plan, while only weekly and yearly products surfaced on the US listing itself. So whether a one-time purchase is available today is not something this page can tell you either way. PhotoBroom’s shape is the boring one: yearly, weekly, or a one-time lifetime purchase, and Pro adds exactly two things — no daily deletion limit, and Auto-Process All Groups.

Which app handles video clutter better?

PhotoBroom and Cleanup each win one half of the problem and lose the other. PhotoBroom breaks video out into three purpose-built categories — Screen Recordings, Large Videos with a configurable size threshold, and Short Videos — because a 4K screen recording of a menu, a 6 GB holiday clip and a two-second accidental capture are three different decisions. Cleanup surfaces large “lookalike” videos and bulk screenshots, and does not break out screen recordings or short videos as categories at all.

Cleanup’s answer is the one PhotoBroom cannot give: compression. It compresses large files with per-video selection, and a hands-on review published on a rival cleaner’s blog — a source with an obvious interest, which makes the praise more notable, not less — reported good compression rates with no noticeable drop in quality and smooth playback afterwards. The same review reported some short clips taking over ten minutes to compress and a stuttery interface on large video libraries. PhotoBroom will help you find a 6 GB video and delete it. It will not shrink it so you can keep it, and for anyone whose position is “I need the space but I am not deleting the wedding footage”, that is a decisive gap.

When should you pick Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner instead?

When the storage problem is not just photos, and compression matters more than deletion. If someone has a bloated inbox, a messy contacts list and a pile of large videos they want to keep but shrink, Cleanup covers all three and PhotoBroom covers none of them. The same hands-on review called Cleanup’s contacts cleanup surprisingly effective at identifying duplicates and incomplete entries, finishing in about thirty seconds. A secondary honest case is wanting a PIN-protected media vault in the same app as the cleaner, which PhotoBroom does not offer.

The table below routes; it does not rank. Three of its six rows go to Cleanup.

Before acting on any of those rows, check that the app in front of you is the one this page describes. The listing name for Apple ID 1510944943 varies by storefront — it appears as “Cleanup: Clean Storage Space” on the Turkish and Singaporean stores — and at least one unrelated app ships under a near-identical name. Every claim here is anchored to that ID, and a review or a teardown that is not anchored to it may be about something else entirely.