Comparison
Best cleaner app for Android
Disclosure: we make one of the apps below. The comparison is organised by what each app can actually do on a modern Android phone, not by who has the prettiest animation.
There's a fact that reorganises this entire category: a third-party app on Android 11+ cannot clear another app's cache, cannot free RAM, and cannot make your phone faster. Root excepted. That's the system's design, not a limitation of any one app.
Which means when an app promises "boost your phone by 40%", one of two things is happening: it's animating a progress bar over a process the system was already doing, or it's doing nothing and calling it a result.
So the useful question isn't "which cleaner is best" — it's "what is actually taking space, and which tool removes that specific thing safely?"
The four things that actually free space
| What | Typical size | How it gets cleaned | |:---|:---|:---| | Photos: duplicates, bursts, screenshots | 3–8 GB on a full phone | Duplicate/near-duplicate scanning with review | | Messenger media (WhatsApp, Telegram) | 1–5 GB | Per-chat storage manager inside the app | | App caches (a few specific apps) | 1–3 GB | System settings, per app | | Leftovers: APKs, downloads, offline maps | 0.5–3 GB | File manager, sort by size |
Everything else in the "cleaner" category is either a shortcut to one of these, or decoration.
The apps, judged against that list
| App | Photo dedupe | Near-duplicates | Compression | System leftovers | Ads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keep Photo: Photo Cleaner | Yes, with review | Yes (visual similarity, bursts) | Yes, with 100% preview | No — photo tool only | Free tier has some |
| Files by Google | File-level duplicates | No | No | Yes (junk, large files) | None |
| SD Maid SE | No | No | No | Yes, deep (corpses, caches) | None |
| Google Photos storage manager | No dedupe | No | Yes (compression) | No | None |
| Typical "cleaner/booster" apps | Sometimes | Rarely | Rarely | Claims only | Heavy |
Where each one wins
Files by Google — free, no ads, and genuinely good at WhatsApp media and junk files. Its duplicate detection is file-level (byte-identical), so it misses "the same photo resized" and bursts.
SD Maid SE — the tool for "my phone is full and I don't know why". It looks at the file system in a way a photo app can't. Steeper interface, and some features want Shizuku or root.
Google Photos storage manager — free if you already use Google Photos. Good for screenshots and blurry shots. It does not dedupe, and "free up space" means the only copy is now in Google's account.
Keep Photo: Photo Cleaner — the photo-specific half done properly: exact duplicates, bursts, visually similar shots, with a review screen before deletion and a compression option. It does not clean app caches or system junk — by design, because that's where the fake-cleaning claims live.
How to test any cleaner in five minutes
- Airplane mode. Open the app, run a scan. If the scan fails or the numbers change when you reconnect the network, it isn't scanning your files.
- Check the "found" list. A real cleaner lists specific files with thumbnails. A fake one shows a progress bar and then a number.
- Delete one item and verify. Look in the gallery's trash — is the file there, in the folder it says?
- Read the permission list. Photos and files: expected. Contacts, call log, accessibility: no.
The honest recommendation
If your problem is system junk, install Files by Google and stop; you don't need anything else, and you definitely don't need to pay.
If your problem is photos — which is 60–80% of the space on a full phone — the honest answer is that the duplicated and near-duplicated shots you never chose to keep are the cheapest gigabytes you'll ever reclaim. That's what our Cleaner does, and it's also what we wrote the storage guide about, if you'd rather do it by hand.
What we won't do: claim to speed up your phone, clean other apps' caches, or cool it down. Those claims are why this category is distrusted, and we'd rather be useful than loud.