PhotoBroom vs Clever Cleaner: The Free One Is Actually Free

Every Clever Cleaner fact on this page was read on 7 August 2026 from the US App Store listing for Clever Cleaner: AI CleanUp App, CleverFiles’ own marketing page and privacy policy, and the 250 most recent US customer reviews in Apple’s public feed. The app was not installed; the last section says what that leaves unverified.

Should you install PhotoBroom or Clever Cleaner?

If the whole requirement is free with no limits, install Clever Cleaner. It is genuinely free — no in-app purchase section exists on its listing, no ads, no account, no deletion cap — and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. PhotoBroom’s case is what it covers and how it behaves: seven cleanup categories including screen recordings, short videos and low scored photos, an explicit reversible Kept list, a native iPad build, and a free tier with nothing locked and every scan result visible, where deletion is metered at 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos. The rest of this page is the detail behind both halves of that answer.

Which app is “Clever Cleaner”?

This page is about Clever Cleaner: AI CleanUp App by CleverFiles Inc., bundle app.clever.unduo — the app that ranked first for the US App Store query clever cleaner on 7 August 2026, from the US company that makes the Disk Drill data-recovery software. The listing’s address ends in id1666645584, and that number is how you know you have the right one, because the name is being cloned: at least four unrelated iOS apps sat in the same search results that day under some variant of “Clever Cleaner” or “Clever Cleanup”, several published within the past year and monetised conventionally. The clones are themselves evidence of the original’s pull. If a listing names a developer other than CleverFiles, it is a different app and nothing on this page applies to it.

PhotoBroom and Clever Cleaner side by side

The table’s conclusion, stated plainly: Clever Cleaner wins the money axis outright — free, uncapped, nothing to buy — and PhotoBroom covers more of the photo library and documents more of what it does. Which of those matters more depends on whether the clutter on your phone is the kind only one of them can see.

Is Clever Cleaner really free?

Yes. As of 7 August 2026 the listing carries no in-app purchase section at all — not a subscription, not a tip jar — shows no ads, requires no account, and caps nothing. Zero of the 250 most recent US reviews mention billing, and dozens celebrate the absence of a paywall. In a category built on fake-free subscription traps, that is nearly unique among maintained apps, and it is the single strongest thing about the product.

Two details are worth knowing before treating free as permanent. The first is the wording. CleverFiles’ page promises that “early users will never be asked to pay for upgrades or new features” — a real commitment, scoped to early users. What happens for later users is a question the promise deliberately leaves open, which is why this page quotes it rather than shortening it to “free forever”.

The second is the mechanism, because free products from for-profit companies always have one, and here it is visible rather than hidden. CleverFiles sells Disk Drill, a paid data-recovery line for Mac and Windows, and Clever Cleaner is top-of-funnel brand equity for that catalogue — the App Store description leads with “developed by the creators of the world-famous #1 Mac data recovery app, Disk Drill”. The launch was accompanied by syndicated PR, and CleverFiles’ own blog ranks Clever Cleaner first in its roundup of duplicate-photo apps, with “perfect scores across all categories”, without explicitly disclosing that CleverFiles owns the app. None of that makes the free less real today. It means the free is a strategy with an owner, not a law of nature.

PhotoBroom’s model sits on the table instead of behind a funnel: nothing is locked and every scan result is visible, free deletion is metered at 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos, and Pro — which removes the cap and adds Auto-Process All Groups — is sold yearly, weekly, or as a one-time lifetime purchase. Against an uncapped free app that is the weaker offer for a pure free-seeker, and the more predictable one for everybody else.

Is Clever Cleaner safe to use?

Its declared privacy posture is the cleanest of any actively maintained competitor this site has researched. The App Store privacy label, read 7 August 2026, contains exactly one section — Data Not Linked to You: Usage Data and Diagnostics, both under Analytics. No tracking section, no linked data, no identifiers, no user content. The privacy policy is app-specific and dated 22 November 2024, which in this category — where listings routinely link boilerplate written for other products — already counts for something.

The gap sits between the marketing page and the policy. CleverFiles’ page states that “Clever Cleaner does all the processing locally on your device” and that “no photos or personal data get uploaded to the cloud” — a real, quotable vendor claim that most competitors never make. But the privacy policy says nothing about photo handling at all, and it lists collected device data that includes a unique device identifier and IP address while naming no analytics vendor. So the on-device claim is best read as what it is: stated by the developer, plausible, and verified by nobody outside CleverFiles. PhotoBroom’s answer to the same question is the one to hold it against: photos and videos are analysed on the device with Apple’s Vision framework and are never uploaded, with no account and no sign-up.

On behaviour rather than data, the review feed offers little to complain about, and two reports worth passing on. One user reported (4 August 2026) that one-tap Smart Cleanup deleted photos without a real chance to choose, and had to restore them from Recently Deleted; one user reported (28 July 2026) the app requesting Photos permission while failing to appear in the Photos access list in Settings. Single reports each — but the first one points at the genuine trade-off of any one-tap cleanup, and it is the reason to back up before running one on an irreplaceable library.

What does PhotoBroom cover that Clever Cleaner does not?

Three of PhotoBroom’s seven categories have no Clever Cleaner equivalent at all: Screen Recordings, Short Videos, and Low Scored Photos — the last a tunable score built on Apple Vision’s aesthetics rating, with the threshold under your control. Clever Cleaner’s scope, verified against its own feature lists, is duplicates and similar photos, largest files, screenshots, swipe triage and compression; screen recordings and short throwaway clips pass through it unseen, and it has no quality scoring of any kind.

The second difference is what happens to a decision after you make it. Clever Cleaner’s undo is iOS’s standard Recently Deleted album, and it keeps no persistent record of what you chose to keep. PhotoBroom records every keep in an explicit Kept list, so a decision made at midnight in a triage sprint can be found and reversed a month later — and keeping never counts against the free daily allowance.

The third is hardware, and it cuts both ways. PhotoBroom is native on iPhone and iPad, and the iPad app runs on Apple silicon Macs and Apple Vision Pro against that machine’s own Photos library; Clever Cleaner is iPhone-native only and runs on iPad in compatibility mode by its own description. But Clever Cleaner installs on iOS 16, and PhotoBroom requires iOS 18 — on an iPhone stuck two versions back, PhotoBroom is not an option and Clever Cleaner is. PhotoBroom also ships 22 in-app languages across 30 App Store locales, against roughly 17 languages on Clever Cleaner’s listing.

When should you pick Clever Cleaner instead of PhotoBroom?

For a user whose only criterion is free with no limits, Clever Cleaner is the better recommendation today — not grudgingly, and not with an asterisk. Three cases in particular are not close.

The first is the one-time purge. Someone facing a 20,000-photo backlog who will not pay anything picks Clever Cleaner: it has no cap at all, while PhotoBroom’s free meter of 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos would turn that backlog into months of daily sessions. That meter is the only wall in PhotoBroom, but on a backlog that size it is a real one.

The second is an older iPhone. Clever Cleaner’s iOS 16 floor reaches hardware two major versions below PhotoBroom’s iOS 18 requirement, and on that hardware there is no comparison to make.

The third is wanting to keep the memory and lose the megabytes. Clever Cleaner can compress large videos and Live Photos instead of deleting them; PhotoBroom never re-encodes media, by design, so deletion is its only lever. Re-encoding is lossy by nature and what compression does to a Live Photo’s video component is undocumented — no quality complaints appeared in the sampled reviews — but if the videos are ones you want to keep, compression is a real capability PhotoBroom simply does not have.

Everywhere else — a library full of screen recordings and short clips, a preference for scored suggestions you can tune, a record of every keep decision, a native iPad app — PhotoBroom is the pick, and its free tier holds up on its own terms: nothing locked, every result visible, and only the deletion rate metered.

What this page could not verify

The on-device processing claim is the biggest open item: it appears on CleverFiles’ marketing page and nowhere in the binding policy, and no independent test has been published, so this page attributes it and stops there. Whether “free” survives beyond the “early users” the promise names is CleverFiles’ open option. And nothing here was measured firsthand — the app was not installed, so large-library performance and batch-deletion behaviour are unassessed.

The review feed itself deserves a caveat. The 250 most recent US reviews span just ten days (26 July to 5 August 2026) — very high velocity for a utility app — and carry signs of aggressive in-app prompting: one five-star review states outright “the app is forcing me to say something” (27 July 2026), and many entries are placeholder-thin. That is evidence of a corpus skewed toward first-session impressions, not evidence of fake reviews, and this page claims nothing more from it than the two dated reports quoted above. It does mean the near-absence of complaints is weaker evidence than 250 reviews would normally be — a feed that shallow has little room for problems that take weeks to notice.