Cleaner Guru is a well-known iPhone cleaning app with thousands of positive reviews on the App Store. But how do you know if the app is right for you?
Like all iPhone apps, Cleaner Guru has its fair share of strengths and weaknesses–and with a very limited free trial, it’s tough to evaluate it fully before you need to pay (especially if you’ve never used iPhone cleaner apps before).
We decided to test the app ourselves and analyze its features, user experience, pros and cons, and price offerings, so we could provide you with all the information you need without having to download it yourself.
Table of Contents
Summary
The Cleaner Guru app is an all-in-one iPhone cleaner from the developer GM UniverseApps Limited. It can help you free up significant storage space on your iPhone by providing cleanup tools for your user data. Specifically, it can eliminate clutter related to your photos, videos, contacts, and even email (e.g., old newsletter subscriptions).
In other words, Cleaner Guru wants to be the only cleaning app on your device. Based on our experience with it—we see the potential. However, we also found possible areas of improvement, which we’ll discuss further in the article.
How Much Does Cleaner Guru Cost?
Cleaner Guru is expensive. As of this writing, you can choose between two subscription types:
- $39.99 per year
- $7.99 per week
It does have a free trial where you can use all of the app’s features for 7 days. However, signing up for the trial automatically activates your weekly subscription. If you don’t want to pay at the end of your trial, you have to cancel the subscription manually 24 hours before the 7 days are up.
Main Features
In this section, we briefly cover Clever Guru’s features to give you an idea of exactly what the app has to offer. While it has its fair share of bloat, we found that Clever Guru is packed with cleaning tools that can make a big impact on your storage space without much effort.
Here’s a breakdown:
- Similar photo cleanup: Cleaner Guru’s detection algorithm can identify both exact duplicates and similar photos—even if there are visible differences in the content. Delete them instantly with one button.
- Swipe gestures: Use Tinder-like swipe gestures to go through your library photos one by one–swipe left to delete and swipe right to keep.
- Video cleanup: Review library videos organized by size and filterable by date, so you can easily eliminate the largest clutter first.
- Compression tool: Make your videos’ file sizes smaller without a noticeable change in visual quality.
- Contacts management: Review your address book, eliminate duplicate and incomplete contacts, and back up your contacts list.
- Email Cleaner: Connect your email and get a list of all your subscriptions, like sales promotions and newsletters, all in one place—with a handy unsubscribe button for each source. After unsubscribing, you can also choose to delete all emails from that sender.
- Extra features: Keep private photos in a secret folder, view alternative charging animations, and add widgets to monitor storage availability on your home screen.
How to Use Cleaner Guru
In this section, we’ll briefly demonstrate how to use Cleaner Guru to clean up your iPhone data. The purpose of this guide is to show you exactly what to expect in terms of user experience and provide step-by-step instructions on how to maximize Cleaner Guru’s many features (since they’re honestly all over the place).
Step 1. Download Cleaner Guru from the App Store. Open the app, sign up for the trial (you have to in order to proceed), and grant it Full Access to your photo library and list of contacts.
Step 2. In the Home menu, select what type of data you want to clean up first. We recommend starting with the Similar Photos section, where Cleaner Guru automatically compiles all duplicate and similar photos in your library. The best copy from each set is already chosen for you, while the rest are marked for deletion. You’ll encounter similar menus in the Live Photos and Screenshots sections (all screenshots are selected for deletion).
Step 3. Next, we recommend reviewing the Organize Videos section. All your library videos are organized by size, but you can also specify the date ranges of the videos you want to review. You can select and delete them in the thumbnail section, but opening individual videos gives you access to the compression tool.
Step 4. Once you’re done deleting similar photos and managing your video clutter, you can do a deeper clean of your library using the Swipe Photos tool (which you can find in the bottom menu). This tool displays your library’s contents one by one, then lets you swipe left to send it to the trash or swipe right to keep it.
Step 5. After decluttering your media, we recommend cleaning your emails next. Mail attachments and even message content can eventually take up a lot of space. Tap Email Cleaner in the bottom menu to start connecting your email. Then, tap Unsubscribe beside the sources you want to remove to avoid filling up your inbox even more (you’ll also have the option to delete all mail from that sender after unsubscribing).
Step 6. Finally, return to the Home menu and scroll down to the very bottom and tap Manage Contacts. You can review duplicate contacts that have the same name, number, or email. You can also review incomplete contacts. Cleaner Guru doesn’t provide an automatic selection for contacts, but you can easily select multiple entries using the Select All button in the top right corner.
After deleting your photos and videos using Cleaner Guru, make sure to delete them again from the Recently Deleted folder in your iPhone’s Photos app. Deleted media items will remain there for 30 days, taking up storage space, until you manually delete them again.
Pros & Cons
When writing about an app’s pros and cons, we take into account its user experience, value for money, and its ability to accomplish what the user needs.
After analyzing Cleaner Guru, we found that it performed really well, and it was a proper “all-in-one” suite. However, we couldn’t sing the same praises for its interface and pricing (especially because there are tools that offer some of these features for free).
- There’s an element of gamification—you can get “rewards” for cleaning up your data, which is a fun idea that isn’t explored much by this app category.
- The app’s features provide all the tools needed to deep clean an iPhone (aside from attachments and system data).
- Its similar detection tool is better than most. It tolerates just enough variation to make sense for the scan.
- The interface is aesthetically pleasing, even though UX could use some work.
- The video compression tool frees up a lot of space (without compromising quality much).
- The app is a bit cluttered with the different types of cleanup features, and it’s not immediately obvious what to do first.
- The interface isn’t intuitive, and tools aren’t obviously placed—for example, the video compression tool is found inside the video organization menu.
- Widgets are the only useful “bonus feature” for storage cleanup. The other features could have been left out.
- The app is expensive, especially because it only provides weekly and annual subscription types.
- Its free trial locks you into activating the subscription. You will need to manually deactivate it if you decide not to pay for it.
Is Cleaner Guru Safe to Use?
Yes! Cleaner Guru is safe to use. Based on our tests, Cleaner Guru has no malware or other types of malicious code embedded in the application package. In terms of privacy, do note that DM UniverseApps Limited collects and shares user data, like language settings, IP address, time zone, device model, etc., with third-party companies for advertising purposes. However, the company is explicitly compliant with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
You can find more information about the type of data Cleaner Guru collects and with whom it’s shared by reviewing the Privacy Policy in the Settings menu of the app.
Final Assessment
Overall, we found that Cleaner Guru mostly lived up to its name as an all-in-one cleaner. It provides coverage for the most high-impact areas, like photos and videos, while also providing tools for less noticeable data footprints, like emails and contacts.
Aside from the wide coverage, we appreciated the depth of the features Cleaner Guru provided. For example, it has an excellent auto-cleanup tool for similar photos (that produces some of the most accurate results we’ve seen)–but the addition of the Swipe Photos features allows for a much deeper clean of the photo library. These tools are usually offered as two separate apps.
Cleaner Guru’s video management tool is also extra useful–being able to delete the biggest videos first (thanks to auto-sorting by file size) and having the option to compress videos can make an immediate and massive difference in your storage space.
This is even reflected in the email cleanup tool as well, which not only unsubscribes you from senders but also gives you an option to delete all their emails. We do wish that the contacts management tool allowed you to merge contacts rather than just delete them.
In our opinion, Cleaner Guru falls short in two areas: User Experience and Price. We think the app needs to be more streamlined in terms of how its many tools are organized, especially for its price. Our second major suggestion for improvement is to add a monthly subscription option as a middle ground between weekly and annual subscriptions (and maybe lower the weekly subscription cost a bit).
Overall, we think Cleaner Guru is suitable for users who fill up their iPhones with media year-round–for those users, the breadth and depth of features can justify an annual subscription. If you won’t be utilizing all of Cleaner Guru’s tools, we recommend seeking more affordable alternatives.
