CleanMy®Phone Clears iPhone Clutter and Funds Ukraine’s Defense

WRDW/WAGT, the Augusta, Georgia station behind the “What the Tech” segment, spotlighted an iPhone app this week that promises to clear years of photo clutter in minutes. CleanMy®Phone scans a camera roll for duplicates, blurry shots and forgotten screenshots, then lets the owner decide what actually gets deleted.

The app is not built by a Silicon Valley startup. MacPaw, a Kyiv-based software company, runs its main office in Ukraine, and the same subscription fee that clears a jammed camera roll also helps fund a foundation that has pushed more than $12 million into wartime medical aid, protective gear and evacuation vehicles since Russia’s 2022 invasion.

What CleanMy®Phone Scans for in a Camera Roll

The app runs a single scan across a phone’s photo library, then sorts everything into groups a person would otherwise have to hunt for by hand. The rundown from WRDW/WAGT listed six buckets the app flags:

• Duplicate photos
• Similar photos taken seconds apart
• Blurry images
• Screenshots
• Screen recordings
• Large videos eating the most storage

That grouping turns a scroll through thousands of images into a shorter set of decisions. If someone snapped six nearly identical shots trying to catch everyone smiling, CleanMy®Phone flags the sharpest one as its pick, but leaves the other five sitting there for a final human check.

Why Nothing Deletes Without Your Approval

CleanMy®Phone does not touch a single photo on its own. Every category is a suggestion, not a command. The user has to tap through and confirm before anything actually leaves the library.

MacPaw says the scanning happens on the device itself, not on company servers, so nothing gets uploaded to be analyzed. If a deletion turns out to be a mistake, Apple’s own Recently Deleted album holds removed images for about 30 days before they’re gone for good.

The app goes beyond deleting, too. It can compress large videos while keeping playback quality intact, and it can convert Live Photos, the few seconds of motion Apple bundles behind each snapshot, into plain still images for anyone who never swipes to replay them.

A Minute of 4K Video Costs 170 Megabytes

The storage-full warning is not random bad luck. Camera hardware has outpaced the base storage tier Apple still ships on entry-level iPhones, and video is the main culprit.

A minute of standard 4K video at 30 frames per second runs about 170 megabytes, according to estimates from Tidy, a phone-storage tracking site. Switch to 4K at 60 frames per second, a setting many people leave on by default, and that climbs to roughly 400 megabytes a minute, a figure DODOcase’s storage guide arrives at independently.

Stack up a season of school plays, birthday parties and vacation clips, and a 64GB phone fills fast. HEVCut’s video size calculator puts a 10-minute clip shot at 4K60 close to 4GB, nearly a tenth of that phone’s entire capacity in one recording.

Photos add up on their own separate timeline. Tidy estimates the average iPhone owner shoots five to ten photos a day, with heavier users reaching 20 or 30, adding up to somewhere between 1,800 and 11,000 new images a year that mostly never get reviewed again.

The Kyiv Company Behind the Icon

MacPaw is best known among Mac owners for CleanMyMac, a desktop cleanup utility it has sold for years. CleanMy®Phone is newer, and it did not start from scratch.

The app evolved out of Gemini Photos, a gallery cleaner MacPaw launched back in 2018 and rebuilt using AI into its current form. MacPaw priced the rebuilt app at $24.99 a year when it introduced it in March 2024, requiring iOS or iPadOS 16.0 or later, according to the company’s own launch release confirming the $24.99 annual price.

MacPaw is not the only Ukrainian software house still shipping products through the war. Cult of Mac has reported that MacPaw, Skylum and Nektony have all kept building and releasing new tools despite Russian missile attacks on the country.

The Money Behind the Frontline Aid

MacPaw set up its charity arm, the MacPaw Foundation, on February 24, 2022, the day Russia’s invasion began. The timeline since then shows a company that kept redirecting resources toward the war even while it kept shipping consumer software.

1. February 24, 2022: MacPaw establishes the MacPaw Foundation as the invasion begins.
2. March 2025: marking two years of wartime support, MacPaw details two medical evacuation vehicles donated to frontline paramedics.
3. April 2025: total support distributed since 2022 passes $12 million, according to reporting from The Next Web.
4. 2026: a fundraiser seeking 1,000,000 hryvnia for tactical medicine and gear stays open through October 30.

MacPaw has also leaned on its own brand recognition to fund hardware. Around the company’s anniversary, it ran a fundraiser for a Ukrainian-made PUNISHER drone for the country’s defenders.

“Some of our team members joined the Defence Forces of Ukraine to stand up for the country,” Oleksandr Kosovan, MacPaw’s founder and chief executive, told Tech.eu.

The company has weathered direct attacks, too. The Next Web detailed how a Russian missile strike hit the business, and how staff kept working through blackouts and air raid warnings in Kyiv.

Is CleanMy®Phone Worth the Subscription?

For most people with a few hundred photos, manual deletion still works fine and costs nothing. Once a library grows into the tens of thousands of images built up over years of iPhone ownership, paying a small subscription to reclaim storage and cut the clutter becomes a reasonable trade, not a necessity.

CleanMy®Phone will not make an iPhone’s storage chip any bigger. What it changes is the hours someone would otherwise spend scrolling, and in this case, some of that $20 lands with a foundation still running fundraisers for a country at war.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does CleanMy®Phone Work on Android Phones?

No. CleanMy®Phone requires iOS or iPadOS 16.0 or later and works only on iPhone and iPad. MacPaw has not released an Android version.

Can I Buy CleanMy®Phone Through Setapp Instead of the App Store?

Yes. MacPaw lists CleanMy®Phone on both the Apple App Store and its own Setapp bundle, giving subscribers of that service another way to access the app without a separate purchase.

How Long Is the Free Trial Before I’m Charged?

CleanMy®Phone offers a three-day free trial that lets new users test the scanning and compression tools before any subscription payment goes through.

Why Did CleanMy®Phone’s Price Drop From $24.99 to About $20?

MacPaw priced the app at $24.99 a year at its March 2024 launch. By the time WRDW/WAGT profiled it in July 2026, the listing had settled at about $20 a year or $8 for a single month. MacPaw has not publicly detailed the adjustment, though App Store pricing commonly shifts with regional promotions and currency updates.

Does Subscribing to CleanMy®Phone Directly Fund Ukraine’s Defense?

Not in a direct, dollar-for-dollar sense. MacPaw the company funds and operates the separate nonprofit MacPaw Foundation, which has directed the millions raised toward medical aid, protective gear and evacuation vehicles, but MacPaw has not published a fixed share of app revenue that flows to the foundation.