CleanMeJoin the waitlist
iOS · in development

Your iPhone isn't full. It's full of the same photo, eleven times.

CleanMe finds what is genuinely reclaimable — near-duplicate shots, dead screenshots, blurred frames, oversized video, duplicate contacts and duplicate files — and tells you the truth about the rest. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing is deleted behind your back.

One email when it ships. Nothing else, ever.

The CleanMe dashboard on an iPhone: 24 GB free of 126 GB, 9.3 GB reclaimable, and the clean-up categories beneath it.
30days
Recently Deletedheld

iOS reserves this album. No app can empty it.

0bytes

leave your phone. No account, no upload, no network call.

1pass

over the library. Every category comes off the same scan.

6kinds

of clutter found: photos, screenshots, blur, video, contacts, files.

30days

Recently Deleted holds what you delete. We say so on the dashboard.

Section 01

What it finds. And what it costs you to keep.

Duplicates and look-alikes

A perceptual descriptor from Vision, not a checksum — so the burst of eleven near-identical shots groups together even after a crop, an exposure tweak or a re-compression.

Screenshots

The receipts, the maps, the two-factor codes. Useful for a day, then pure weight. Separated from real photographs so a screenshot is never judged against one.

Blurred frames

Laplacian variance over the same thumbnail: sharp frames swing hard at the edges, soft ones go flat. The soft ones surface, and you decide from a full-screen view.

Oversized video

The clips that actually own your storage. Compress instead of delete — re-encode to a smaller frame, watch the result, then replace only if it still looks right.

Duplicate contacts

Matched on shared number, shared email, then name — where a name-only match applies only if one card has no number at all. Two different John Smiths stay two people.

Files in folders you pick

Byte-identical copies found by size, then a 64 KB probe hash, then a full SHA-256 — so a clean folder costs one stat per file and no reads at all.

Section 02

Most cleaners lie about this. We would rather lose the download.

iOS sandboxes every app. No App Store app can delete another app's caches, clear “system junk”, or touch files it does not own — the cleaners that claim otherwise are not doing it either. Here is the whole list of what CleanMe cannot do, in the app and on this page.

The one warning that matters most

iCloud Photos syncs a library. It does not back one up. Delete a photo on this phone and it goes from iCloud too — so CleanMe never puts a reassuring “backed up” badge next to a delete button.

  • It cannot clear “system junk” or other apps' caches

    There is no API for it. There is also no API that lists your installed apps or their sizes — the private one gets an app rejected, and the public one only reports whether a URL scheme has a handler.

  • It cannot empty Recently Deleted

    iOS reserves that album. Deleted photos keep occupying space for 30 days, so the dashboard says so rather than letting the free-space figure appear stuck.

  • It cannot delete anything silently

    Every deletion routes through the system photo library, so iOS presents its own confirmation sheet. There is no silent-delete path, by design.

  • It cannot free space held only in iCloud

    A photo iOS has offloaded is not local bytes, so removing it frees nothing here. CleanMe measures the split, subtracts it from every total, and shows you the difference instead of quoting a number it cannot deliver.

Section 03

One pass. Then your call, every time.

  1. 01

    It reads the library once

    Decoding a thumbnail per asset is the expensive step, so it happens exactly once and the same 256px bitmap feeds every check. Comparison is windowed by capture time, not all-pairs — a 40 000-photo library stays tractable instead of quadratic.

  2. 02

    You review before anything goes

    Ticking a 110pt tile is a guess. Open any photo full size, swipe through the rest of its cluster, pinch to zoom, and select from there — it is the same selection the grid holds, so a photo ticked full screen comes back ticked.

  3. 03

    A keeper is recommended, never forced

    Resolution, file size and sharpness are weighted; edits earn a bonus. Favourites are a tier, not a bonus — a starred photo sorts ahead of everything structurally, so no quality gap can ever outvote it into the delete pile.

Section 04

Keep the video. Lose the gigabytes.

Deleting a clip you filmed is a bad trade. CleanMe re-encodes it to a smaller frame into a temporary file, and nothing reaches your library until you have watched the result — original and encode behind one player, seeking to the same frame, so you are comparing a picture rather than two different moments.

  • Only presets that genuinely shrink the frame are offered, so the label always names the resolution that comes out.
  • Save first, delete second — if the save fails your library is untouched, and if you decline the deletion you are told the library grew rather than shown a saving that did not happen.
  • Clips with any offloaded bytes are refused outright rather than quietly pulled back over your data.
Replace with a smaller encode−73%
Original4K · 2160p · 3 min 12 s
1.42 GB
Encoded1080p · same length
384 MB

Nothing is written to your library until you have watched the encode next to the original.

Section 05

Nothing leaves the phone. There is nowhere for it to go.

No account
Nothing to sign up for. The app has no idea who you are.
No server
Every scan, hash and comparison runs on your device. There is no backend to leak.
No network
Network access stays off even for thumbnails — an offloaded photo renders from whatever copy is local, and says so.
No third parties
No analytics SDK, no ad network, no crash reporter shipping your library's shape to anyone.
Section 06

Pay once for the phone. Or keep the inbox clean for less than a coffee.

The scan is free and stays free — every figure, including what lives only in iCloud. Cleaning past the free allowance is what costs money, and it costs it once. The subscription exists for the one job that never finishes: your inbox.

Free

$0

The whole scan, every number, and enough cleaning to prove it works.

  • Full library scan, every category
  • 100 deletions or 500 MB, whichever comes first
  • One video compression
  • The honest list of what no app can clean
Join the waitlist

Lifetime

Once
$19.99once

Every storage feature, paid one time. No subscription, ever.

  • Unlimited deletions and compressions
  • Duplicate contacts and files
  • Family Sharing
  • Every future storage feature
Join the waitlist

Pro

$19.99per year, or $2.99 a month

Lifetime's storage tools plus the things that keep happening.

  • Everything in Lifetime while subscribed
  • One-tap unsubscribe from bulk senders
  • Weekly report: what piled up, in one notification
  • Background scans and a live widget
Join the waitlist
No weekly plan
The $4.99-a-week cleaner is a trap with a free trial in front of it. There is no weekly price here and there never will be.
No paywall before the scan
You see your own numbers first. The app asks for money when you hit a limit, and names the limit.
No fake urgency
No countdown, no “storage critical” notification engineered to sell, no trial that quietly converts.

Prices are in US dollars and will be set per region on the App Store. Lifetime and Pro can be restored on any device signed in with the same Apple ID.

Section 07

Questions worth asking

Because iOS moved those photos to Recently Deleted, where they sit for 30 days and keep occupying storage. No app can empty that album — iOS reserves it. Open Photos → Recently Deleted and delete from there to get the space back immediately. CleanMe tells you this on the dashboard instead of letting the number look broken.

It never deletes anything on its own. It recommends one keeper per cluster and pre-ticks the rest, you review that selection — full screen if you want — and iOS then presents its own confirmation sheet. Favourites are protected structurally: a starred photo always sorts ahead of the others, and a second favourite in the same cluster is left unticked rather than queued.

No, and neither does any other App Store app. iOS sandboxes them all. What is genuinely reachable is your photo library, your address book and folders you hand over through the Files app — which is where the great majority of a full iPhone actually lives.

They are counted separately and subtracted from every reclaimable figure, because bytes that live in iCloud are not bytes a deletion hands back. There is also no API that evicts a local copy while keeping the iCloud one — only Settings → Photos → Optimize iPhone Storage does that, on iOS's own schedule.

You decide, before anything is replaced. The original and the encode play behind one switch, seeked to the same frame, full screen and turned to match the clip's own aspect. If the encode does not hold up, nothing is saved and nothing is deleted.

It is in development now, and the waitlist is the only place the ship date will be announced. The scan is free. Cleaning past the free allowance is a one-time $19.99 Lifetime purchase, and the inbox features are a $19.99-a-year Pro plan. No weekly plan, no trial that converts, no ads.

Get the space back. Keep the photos.

Join the waitlist and we will send exactly one email, on the day it is on the App Store.

One email when it ships. Nothing else, ever.

One email
The launch, and nothing before or after it. No drip sequence.
Your address, nowhere else
Not sold, not shared, not handed to an ad network.
Gone on request
Reply to the mail, or ask any time, and the address is deleted.