Security and privacy decision
Cleaner
A single experienced iOS developer can reproduce the core on-device duplicate detection and cleanup in about a week and maintain it; the vendor's value is mostly polish, App Store distribution and ongoing product work rather than an unreproducible moat.
View on the App Store↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$50one-off28 h to build
$0/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Scan the device photo/media library and app-accessible storage, identify duplicates and large/cache files using on-device heuristics or models, present candidates for user review, and delete selected items with a one-tap flow.
What it still won’t have
- Polished App Store UX, branding and existing user reviews
- Developer-run updates and bug fixes already deployed to users
- Analytics and crash/reporting pipelines unless implemented
- Ongoing App Store distribution and developer account management
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Cleaner does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build an iOS app in Swift + SwiftUI that scans the user's Photos library and on-device media to identify duplicate and large files, presents grouped candidate results for user review, and performs deletions. Stack: Swift 5, SwiftUI, Photos framework, CoreImage/accelerate for perceptual hashing, Combine for async, StoreKit for subscriptions. Core features in scope: (1) index photos/videos with size/date/metadata, (2) compute perceptual hashes and cluster near-duplicates on-device, (3) preview groups with thumbnails and allow selecting/undoing deletions, (4) one-tap cleanup workflow, (5) local privacy-first processing (no network calls), (6) StoreKit subscription gate for Pro features, (7) unit and UI tests, error handling for permissions and failed deletes. Out of scope: scraping or cleaning third-party app caches via private APIs, server-side ML, multi-device sync, and App Store submission automation. Deliver a CI job that runs tests and verifies basic UI flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- Evidence score78
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 1
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productCleaner: Clean Up iPhone App - App Store
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
