PhotoBroom vs Clever Cleaner: Free Now Means Daily Limits

Every Clever Cleaner fact on this page was re-read on 30 September 2026 from the US App Store listing for Clever Cleaner: AI CleanUp App, CleverFiles’ marketing page, privacy policy and Terms of Use, and the 100 most recent US customer reviews in Apple’s public feed. The app was not installed; the last section says what that leaves unverified.

This page was first published on 7 August 2026, when Clever Cleaner had no in-app purchases, no limits and a privacy label that declared no tracking. It called the app genuinely free, and on that date it was. By 30 September all three had changed, and the page has been rewritten to match. When exactly the change shipped is not something this page could establish.

Should you install PhotoBroom or Clever Cleaner?

For most people on iOS 18, PhotoBroom. This is PhotoBroom’s own site, so weigh that, but every reason is checkable. PhotoBroom locks nothing, shows every scan result, and meters free deletion at 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos, a number it states before you install. Clever Cleaner’s limit is shown only inside the app, can change remotely, and may differ from one user to the next. PhotoBroom also covers screen recordings, short videos and low scored photos, keeps an explicit reversible Kept list, and runs natively on iPad.

Clever Cleaner is the better pick in three specific cases: an iPhone that cannot run iOS 18, wanting to compress media rather than delete it, and swiping through a huge backlog for free, since its Swipe mode has no daily limit. 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: both apps are now free with a daily limit and a paid tier, and the difference on money is disclosure. PhotoBroom publishes its limit; Clever Cleaner shows its limit only inside the app. Clever Cleaner keeps the older-iPhone and compression advantages, and PhotoBroom covers more of the photo library with a narrower privacy declaration.

Is Clever Cleaner still free?

Free to download and free to use within limits, but no longer free without limits. On 30 September 2026 the listing shows an In-App Purchases section, and the description says: “Clever Cleaner is free to download and use within generous daily limits. To remove the limits, choose one of the Premium options: a weekly plan with a 3-day free trial, a yearly plan, or a one-time lifetime purchase.” Two things did not change. There are still no ads, and the Swipe mode is exempt: “Swipe has no daily limit.”

The size of the limit is the gap. Neither the listing, the marketing page nor the Terms of Use (updated 31 July 2026) give a number. The Terms describe the limits as “a maximum amount of data that can be deleted or compressed per day”, say the current limits “are displayed in the App”, and reserve the right to change them “remotely without an App update”. The same section says limits “may not apply uniformly to all users; for example, users who first installed earlier versions of the App may continue to use it without certain limits”. That reads as room for longtime users to keep what they had, but it is phrased as a possibility, not a promise. The line this page quoted in August, “early users will never be asked to pay for upgrades or new features”, no longer appears on CleverFiles’ marketing page.

The marketing has not caught up with the model. The listing still calls it “a truly free iPhone cleaner app”, and the marketing page headline still reads “Truly Free iPhone Cleaner App, No Ads!”. As of 30 September 2026, calling an app with daily limits and a weekly subscription “truly free” is misleading, in this site’s assessment. The free tier is real, but “truly” promises more than a limit whose size CleverFiles does not publish. Of the 100 most recent US reviews (16 to 28 September 2026), 23 use the word free: 20 describe the app as free, and 3 dispute it. A three-star review is titled “Does What It Says, But It’s Not Free For Life, Just 3 days????” (26 September); a one-star review titled “Not really free” calls the copy “False advertising but thanks for what I can delete daily!” (20 September); and a one-star review reads, in full, “Not free” (17 September).

PhotoBroom’s model is the same shape with the number printed on it: 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. Which free allowance is larger cannot be said from the outside, because only one of them is public.

Is Clever Cleaner safe to use?

On photos, CleverFiles puts its on-device claim in writing. Its Terms of Use, dated 31 July 2026 and not read for the August version of this page, state that analysis “is performed entirely locally on your device, using our own on-device machine-learning models in combination with built-in Apple system frameworks (such as Apple’s Vision framework)”, and that photos and videos “are not uploaded to our servers as part of this analysis”. That is the developer’s statement rather than an independently verified fact, but it sits in the Terms, not only on the marketing page. The Terms also name the analytics it uses: Google Firebase Analytics and Firebase Crashlytics.

The privacy label moved the other way. In August it declared only Usage Data and Diagnostics, not linked to identity, with no tracking section. On 30 September 2026 it declares:

• Data Used to Track You: Identifiers, which Apple’s label defines as data that “may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies”.
• Data Linked to You: Identifiers (Device ID) for Developer’s Advertising or Marketing; Usage Data (Product Interaction) for Analytics; Identifiers (User ID) for App Functionality.
• Data Not Linked to You: Purchases (Purchase History) for Developer’s Advertising or Marketing and for Analytics; Diagnostics (Crash Data, Other Diagnostic Data) for Analytics.

The privacy policy linked from the listing has moved to a new address but not changed: it is still dated 22 November 2024, still says no personally identifiable information is collected, and still says nothing about photos. Neither it nor the Terms explain what the tracking identifier is for. PhotoBroom’s label declares tracking as well, and its privacy policy says what for: AppsFlyer attributes installs and measures its ad campaigns. Photos and videos are analysed on the device with Apple’s Vision framework and never uploaded, with no account and no sign-up.

One behavioural note carries over from the August research: a 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. That was on a version before 3.0, and CleverFiles has since rebuilt Smart Cleanup, but it is still the reason to back up before running any one-tap cleanup on an irreplaceable library.

What should you know before installing Clever Cleaner?

Four things, each checkable against CleverFiles’ own documents.

Nobody can tell you your limit in advance. Clever Cleaner’s Terms say the current limits “are displayed in the App”, can be changed “remotely without an App update”, and “may not apply uniformly to all users”. So no review, roundup or comparison, this one included, can tell you what your allowance will be before you install; a reviewer calling it generous may have had a different limit from yours, or none. The Terms give data volume as the example of what is metered, so a day’s allowance is not a fixed number of photos, and the usage counter can sync through iCloud “so that it persists across reinstallations”. PhotoBroom’s rule is the same for every user and printed on this page: 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos.

A public promise was withdrawn. In August, CleverFiles’ marketing page said “early users will never be asked to pay for upgrades or new features”. That line is gone. What replaces it, in the Terms, is that earlier installers “may continue to use it without certain limits”, which is a possibility, not a commitment, and does not say which limits.

Its best-known ranking is self-published. CleverFiles’ own roundup of duplicate-photo apps, updated 17 August 2026, ranks Clever Cleaner first and says it “earned perfect scores across all categories, which is something no other photo-deleting app has been able to achieve”. The article text does not say that CleverFiles makes the app; the connection is visible only in the site’s footer. The same article says its testing checks “whether free versions actually work or just tease you with limitations”, yet it lists Clever Cleaner’s free version as “Generous” without stating the limit. This site is PhotoBroom’s, and says so; read both with the author in mind.

“Without losing quality” is a claim, not a measurement. The marketing page offers to “Compress Photos and Videos Without Losing Quality”. Shrinking a photo or video by re-encoding it discards data by definition; whether the difference is visible to you is something CleverFiles has not published a test of, and this page did not measure. If the originals matter, keep a backup before compressing them.

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 is 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, large videos, screenshots, Live Photo conversion, compression and swipe triage; 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 has a Skip List you add photos and videos to, to leave them out of cleanup; whether a keep-swipe lands there is not documented. PhotoBroom records every keep, from every category, 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 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 20 languages on Clever Cleaner’s listing.

When should you pick Clever Cleaner instead of PhotoBroom?

Three cases still favour Clever Cleaner, and none of them is close.

The first 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 second is wanting to keep the memory and lose the megabytes. Clever Cleaner can compress photos, 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, but if the videos are ones you want to keep, compression is a real capability PhotoBroom simply does not have. Note that compression counts against Clever Cleaner’s free limit too.

The third is swipe triage at volume without paying. Clever Cleaner’s Swipe has no daily limit. PhotoBroom’s swipe deck is free to use, but the deletions it commits count against the free allowance of 50 items of any type per calendar day plus 2 large videos. If you have 20,000 photos and intend to swipe through them all this week for free, Clever Cleaner’s Swipe is the better tool. And if you installed Clever Cleaner before the limits arrived, check what it shows you: its Terms allow for earlier installs staying uncapped.

The case this page made in August, that Clever Cleaner clears a whole backlog for free with every tool, no longer holds as stated, because its other tools now have a limit whose size is not published. Everywhere else, PhotoBroom is the pick: 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, and a free limit you can read before you install.

What this page could not verify

When the change shipped is the first open item. The listing had no in-app purchases on 7 August 2026 and had them on 30 September, and the only archived copy of the listing is from 2 August. The Terms of Use that describe the daily limits carry a date of 31 July, a week before the listing showed nothing to buy; whether that section was already in them on 7 August is not known. The size of the free limit is the second: it is shown only in the app, and the Terms say it can change remotely and differ between users. What the declared tracking identifier is used for is the third; the policy documents do not say. The on-device processing commitment is written into the Terms of Use but has not been independently tested. And nothing here was measured firsthand: the app was not installed, so large-library performance and how the limit is displayed are unassessed.