CleverFiles introduces clever cleaner, a aree and ad-free iPhone storage cleanup app

If you’ve ever tried to figure out how to free up space on an iPhone without deleting everything you love, you’re not alone. That’s exactly why there’s a huge selection of iPhone cleaner apps on the App Store that offer quick and easy ways to do just that.

Below, we’ll talk about one of those apps (and about iPhone storage management as a whole). Let’s get started.

What Is Clever Cleaner?

Clever Cleaner, or as it’s listed on the App Store, Clever Cleaner: AI CleanUp App, is a free and ad-free iPhone cleaning app. It comes from CleverFiles, the developer best known for its data recovery tool, Disk Drill.

Although relatively new, it quickly rose in popularity and now has a 4.8 rating based on 3.2K reviews on the App Store, with glowing feedback, and it’s easy to see why:

• It’s absolutely free. Unlike most apps listed as “free”, this one has no hidden purchases, no locked features, no “PRO” upgrades. Everything is available from the start.
• It has zero ads, none at all, which is a rarity in this space.
• It uses AI algorithms for its Similars feature, which identifies and groups similar photos and videos. It’s surprisingly accurate, even compared to many paid options.
• It includes 4 main cleaning features, and as stated on the Clever Cleaner official webpage, the app will be “Free Forever – No Paid Plans!” Early users will never be asked to pay for upgrades or new features.

So it’s easy to see why Clever Cleaner is quickly gaining popularity. There simply aren’t many free competitors that offer the same capabilities.

We’ll demonstrate how to clear space on an iPhone using this app with step-by-step instructions, and we also want to touch on iPhone storage management in general.

Video Guide

Why iPhone users need a smarter cleanup tool

iPhones are generally pretty good at managing storage. iOS offers automatic tools like app offloading, smart photo compression, and storage optimization. In a lot of cases, you don’t even have to think about it, your iPhone quietly handles things behind the scenes.

But for many people, that’s just not enough.

There are tons of discussions online, especially on places like Reddit, where users vent about how badly iPhone storage management needs a full revamp. The built-in tools are helpful, but when you start running out of space, they don’t always go far enough.

To be fair, Apple has made improvements. A good example is the iOS 16 update that introduced the new Duplicates feature in the Photos app. It lets you easily merge duplicate photos to save storage space. The problem? It only flags exact matches, photos that are pixel-for-pixel identical. For most people, it doesn’t move the needle much, because real-world clutter usually comes from similar photos: near-duplicates, slightly different selfies, and so on.

That’s where third-party apps come in. Many offer tools that not only find and merge true duplicates but also detect similar photos, the ones that are almost the same but not quite.
And that’s a lot harder than it sounds: to do it right, the app has to actually analyze the objects in the photo (faces, backgrounds, angles) rather than just comparing metadata or file size. It needs real image recognition to make smart choices, not just simple checks.

That’s a big reason why smarter, AI-powered cleanup apps like Clever Cleaner look like a much better alternative to what Apple devices can do out of the box (or better yet, what they don’t do).

How to clear storage on iPhone the smart way

Let’s get back to Clever Cleaner. How exactly can it free up storage on your iPhone? We already mentioned Similars, it’s the main feature, yes, but if you’re looking for even more methods to free up space on your iPhone, Clever Cleaner has a couple of other useful tools too. Here’s a full rundown:

• Similars. You already know: it finds both exact duplicates and similar photos; can clean up your photo library faster and smarter.
• Screenshots. The app gathers all your screenshots into one place, which makes it easy to review and bulk-delete them.
• Heavies (large file finder). Clever Cleaner spots the biggest files taking up space (for most people, that’s videos). It sorts them by size, with the biggest ones at the top for quick removal, something the native iPhone apps don’t do. It’s another reason why apps like this exist: to pick up the slack where Apple’s tools fall short.
• Lives. This one’s pretty clever (forgive the pun). Clever Cleaner can convert Live Photos into regular still images. It removes the short video clip attached to each Live Photo, which can free up a surprising amount of space. Not many apps offer a feature like this, and it’s a smart way to save storage without deleting anything that’s important.

Between all four tools, Clever Cleaner gives you a simple, targeted way to actually free up space, not just chip away at it. The most powerful of them all is Similars, since most of us probably have a lot of duplicate or near-duplicate photos clogging up storage.

Here’s how to use it step-by-step:

1. Download Clever Cleaner from the App Store, open the app, and allow access to your photos.
2. Go to the Similars tab.
3. Tap Smart Cleanup at the bottom (this option automates the entire process).
4. The app will suggest photos for deletion based on AI analysis.
5. If you see an image you don’t want to remove, tap Restore.
6. If everything looks good, use Slide to delete and confirm the cleanup.

That’s it. In just a few taps, you can remove duplicates and similar photos from your phone. If you prefer a more “semi-automatic” approach, you can stay hands-on:

1. Tap into any group of similar photos manually.
2. The app preselects the “Best Shot” based on quality and clarity, for quicker decisions, but you can select a different shot.
3. Tap Skip All to move to the next group without deleting anything.
4. Tap Move to Trash to mark the selected photos for deletion and move automatically to the next group.

This way, you stay fully in control, without having to do everything manually like you would in the Photos app. After you’re finished, tap Empty Trash in Clever Cleaner and confirm the deletion of all selected files.

The app will then remind you to clear out the Recently Deleted album in Photos (if you skip this step, the deleted photos will still occupy space on your iPhone for the next 30 days).

Pretty simple and intuitive, as you can see, and definitely way easier than trying to clear an iPhone by hand.

Final thoughts

If you’ve ever searched for a free app to clear up storage on your iPhone, you know it’s not always easy, and not every app that claims to help actually does. A lot of so-called iPhone cleaners list their apps as “free” on the App Store, but then lock essential features behind paywalls. In worse cases, they’ll let you scan your device but won’t allow you to delete anything unless you upgrade to a paid plan or subscription. According to Statista, mobile apps generated roughly 8.4 billion downloads in the Apple App Store. Yet out of all the countless options, finding a truly good free app isn’t always easy, partly because of how the App Store is designed, and partly because of some borderline shady “bait and switch” tactics by certain developers.

For people specifically looking for a truly free solution that’s also capable enough to compete with paid options, it can be tricky to find something that actually delivers. Clever Cleaner seems to be exactly that, a rare app that’s genuinely free, effective, and surprisingly powerful without all the typical catches.