Do phone cleaner apps help declutter your digital space?

Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home — it’s time to declutter your phone, too. We reviewed the 10 most popular phone cleaner apps on the Apple App Store, designed to free up storage by removing duplicate photos, large files, and unused contacts. But do these apps truly help organize your digital space, or are they just another way to flood your inbox with spam and increase privacy risks? Let’s find out.

Key insights

• Unsettlingly, all of the phone cleaner apps share user data with third parties. The so-called “tracking” involves linking user or device data collected from the app with third-party data for targeted advertising, ad measurement, or sharing it with a data broker¹. Once shared, this data can potentially end up in the hands of hundreds of partners, who are free to use it for their own purposes — such as serving highly targeted ads.
• 90% of cleaner apps share identifiers such as User ID and Device ID, while 70% go even further, sharing these identifiers along with additional data like location, purchase history, product interactions, and more.
• Interestingly, 20% of phone cleaner apps also collect and share user location data with third parties. This raises concerns about the necessity and intent behind such data collection — after all, why would a phone cleaner app need access to a user's location? These apps are primarily designed to optimize device performance by removing unnecessary files and managing storage — functions that have no clear connection to location tracking.
• The app that shares the most data is “Cleaner Kit” by BPMobile, which shares nine types of user data with third parties. These include precise location, coarse location, user ID, device ID, purchase history, product interaction, advertising data, other usage data (related to user activity in the app), and other data types.
• Before using a phone cleaner app, check its privacy section on the app store to see what data it collects. Alternatively, you can clean your phone manually without an app. On iPhones, regularly delete unwanted photos and videos, then clear the Recently Deleted folder. Lowering the Camera app’s image quality can also save space. For apps, consider deleting or offloading ones you no longer use. The iPhone Storage menu in Settings lets you view apps by size or last used date, helping you decide what to remove².

Methodology and sources

We identified the 10 most popular cleaner apps in the United States using AppMagic³ by selecting the time period of February 2025, with the tags: app, cleaner, and store: iPhone App Store. Then, we analyzed their privacy details on the Apple App Store, examining if the apps collect data for the purpose of “Third-Party Advertising,” whether they collect any data linked to the user, and examined information about the collected data types.

Data was collected from:

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