Free on Android and iPhone
Find what you don't need.
Decide yourself what goes.
AI Storage Cleaner scans your gallery, address book and calendar on your phone, groups what looks redundant, and shows you every item before anything is removed. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is deleted without your approval.
Free, supported by ads. No account, no sign-up. Android 7.0 and up.
Measured, or not shown.
Storage cleaners in this category have a habit: they open with a large, frightening number. "12.4 GB of junk found." That number is usually an item count multiplied by a guess.
This app used to do it too. Duplicates were priced at 3.5 MB each, blurry photos at 500 KB, screenshots at 100 KB, and the product of that arithmetic was shown as if it had been measured. The scan progress bar was on a timer, climbing whether or not a single file had been read.
All of it is gone. Sizes now come from the system's own records. An item whose size won't resolve contributes nothing: not a guess, not a zero. Where we didn't measure, you see a dash. Where it's partial, you see a "~". It makes the app's numbers smaller. It also makes them true.
You approve every deletion
The app builds a selection; Android shows its own delete confirmation. Large selections are split into batches, so you may see more than one dialog for one cleanup.
Nothing is pre-ticked
Every checkbox in Smart Clean starts off, because deletion here is permanent. You opt in to each category yourself.
Unsure means not shown
Similar photos are matched by a perceptual hash computed on your phone. Frames with no detail are refused a hash rather than collapsed into one false group. It finds fewer duplicates than it could. That is the point.
What it actually does
Five things, described the way they behave.
Your storage, as the system reports it
Home opens on a six-part breakdown: Photos, Videos, Apps, System, Other, Free. Where a figure can't be measured — a partial permission, a platform that won't report it — you get a dash instead of a number, and where it's incomplete you get a "~".
Eight kinds of gallery clutter
Photos group five ways: exact duplicates, similar shots, WhatsApp images, screenshots, and photos that look out of focus. Videos group three ways: duplicates, clips under a minute, and screen recordings. In duplicate and similar groups the photo being kept is locked, so you can't select it by accident.
"Short Recordings" means any clip under a minute, including ordinary short family videos. Review it, don't trust it blind.
Duplicate contacts are merged, not guessed away
Contacts sharing a phone number are grouped, and resolving a group merges rather than deletes: numbers, emails, addresses, organisations, websites, social handles, birthdays and notes are combined into the record you keep. A duplicate whose data can't be fully confirmed in the keeper is deliberately left on your phone.
Grouping uses the last 10 digits of a number, so two different international numbers ending the same way can land in one group. Contacts with no number are never grouped.
A compressor that keeps your originals
Pick photos, choose smallest file, balanced or best quality, and the app writes a new smaller copy into your gallery with the original date and EXIF intact. Your original file is never modified, replaced or deleted.
Which means compressing alone does not free space — it uses slightly more, until you delete the originals yourself.
A PIN-locked space, described accurately
Secret Space moves photos, videos and contacts out of your gallery and address book into the app's private storage, behind a 4-digit PIN stored only as a salted hash. It stops someone browsing your gallery.
Files are moved, not encrypted. The protection is the app sandbox plus the PIN — it does not stop someone with deep access to an unlocked device. And because the files live inside the app, uninstalling it or clearing its data deletes everything in the vault.
Also included: an App Manager that lists every installed app by size and, if you grant Usage Access, when you last opened it — plus 19 languages, and light, dark and system themes.
What stays on your phone, and what doesn't
Your photos, videos, contacts and calendar entries are read, hashed and compared on your device. They are never uploaded. The app contains no upload path of any kind, so there is no server of ours holding your content — including no sharing of it with ad partners.
The app is not silent, though, and we won't claim otherwise. It sends anonymous usage and crash diagnostics, registers for push notifications, fetches its configuration remotely, and requests ads. Your advertising identifier goes to those ad networks. Your photos do not.
Every permission, and why
| Permission | Why it's needed |
|---|---|
| Photos and videos | To scan your gallery for duplicate, similar, blurry, screenshot and WhatsApp photos, and for duplicate, short and screen-recording videos — and to save compressed copies back. Grant access to selected photos only and the app tells you the numbers are partial. |
| Contacts | To find duplicate and incomplete contacts so you can merge or delete them, and to move contacts into Secret Space. Write access is required because merging, deleting and vaulting all change your address book. |
| Calendar | To list past and upcoming events so you can clear old ones. Reads writable calendars from five years back to one year ahead; holiday and birthday calendars are skipped. |
| Notifications | To tell you when a scan or compression batch finishes, and to deliver messages from us — which includes promotional push. |
| Foreground service | So a long compression keeps running while you use other apps. It will not survive a force-stop. |
| Installed apps | To list your installed apps in App Manager with their size and type. Your app list is never transmitted. |
| Usage Access (optional) | Only for a "last used" label in App Manager. Without it the app works and the label is simply absent. |
Full detail: Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
Questions worth asking first
- Does it delete my files permanently?
- Yes. There is no recycle bin in this app, no undo and no grace period. On Android 10 and newer, Android itself shows the delete confirmation and only the items you approve are removed — but once they're gone, this app cannot bring them back. Anything you want to keep, untick before you confirm.
- Does it have ads?
- Yes. The app is free and paid for by ads. There is no premium tier and no in-app purchase, which also means there is no way to pay to remove them. The one place with no ads is Secret Space.
- Does compression reduce quality?
- It reduces JPEG quality by design — that is where the saving comes from. Resolution is never reduced and EXIF is preserved. Some files won't shrink at all; already-optimised JPEGs and lossless PNGs are reported back to you as "no gain" rather than as failures. Your original is always kept.
- Is the vault encrypted?
- No, and we won't say it is. Files are moved out of your gallery into the app's private storage, where other gallery apps can't see them, behind a PIN stored only as a salted hash. That stops someone browsing your gallery. It does not stop someone with deep access to an unlocked or compromised device. Uninstalling the app also deletes everything in the vault.
- What does the "AI" in the name actually do?
- It's the product name. The detection is deterministic code running on your phone: a perceptual hash for duplicate and similar photos, a focus measure for photos that look out of focus, filename and folder patterns for screenshots and WhatsApp images, duration and file size for video duplicates. No model, no cloud, no learning from your habits.
- If I tick "Screenshots" in Smart Clean, what gets deleted?
- All of them. Duplicate and Similar keep one photo from each group and remove the rest, but Screenshots, WhatsApp Images and Blurry are whole-category deletions. If you only want some of them gone, open that category on its own and pick item by item.
- Does it work offline?
- The scanning, reviewing, compressing and deleting all run on your device and need no connection. Ads and app configuration need the network.
Smaller numbers. True ones.
Free, supported by ads. No account, no sign-up.
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