Swipe44 vs Cleaner Guru: Clean Up Storage

Quick answer

Cleaner Guru: Clean Up Storage by GM UniverseApps Limited, written as “Cleaner Guru” throughout its own description, is an iPhone storage cleaner that has been on the App Store since 2019. It scans for duplicate and similar photos, compresses video, deletes and unsubscribes from Gmail mail, merges duplicate contacts and holds files in a password-protected vault. It is free to download with eight in-app purchases, and the listing never says what any of them unlock.

Swipe44 is a swipe-based camera-roll cleaner. You work through decks of photos, swipe right to keep and left to delete, and the marked ones wait in a pending pile you clear with a single confirmation. It is free to download, and its listing does not spell out what a Pro subscription adds.

Cleaner Guru: Clean Up Storage does more if you want one app that handles video, email and contacts as well as photos. Swipe44 is the closer fit if you would rather go through the camera roll photo by photo, and want to see the subscription price before you install.

Side-by-side

Where Cleaner Guru: Clean Up Storage wins

It cleans four things Swipe44’s listing does not cover. Its description lists video compression “with minimal quality loss”, deleting mail in bulk and unsubscribing from spam lists in Gmail, finding and merging duplicate contacts, and a secret folder that keeps sensitive photos and videos behind a password. Swipe44’s listing describes photos and nothing else. If your storage problem goes beyond the camera roll, that breadth is the whole argument.

A rating history that goes back to 2019. Cleaner Guru: Clean Up Storage has been on the App Store since 2019 and holds 4.52 from 148,600 US ratings, at version 3.5.8. Swipe44 shipped in 2026, is at version 1.0.1, and has 6 US ratings. Six ratings tell you very little.

It reads in 17 languages. Its store page lists English plus 16 more, including Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese and Ukrainian. Swipe44’s store page lists one: English. If English is not your first language, that decides it.

Reviewers say the cleanup itself works. In a sample of 500 recent US reviews, reviewers describe it as fast and easy on a library too big to sort by hand, and say it freed real space, one of them “over 150GB in one day”. Reviewers also single out the duplicate-photo cleanup.

Where Swipe44 wins

A deck you swipe, not a scan result you scroll. Swipe44 hands you photos one at a time in decks (Recents, by month, by week, or shuffled) and shows each file’s size on the card. Once you have judged a photo it drops out of future decks, so you never see it twice. You can undo the last swipe or bookmark a photo for later, and any deck resumes where you stopped. Cleaner Guru’s listing does not describe a swipe interface or deck browsing.

The price and the billing period are on the store page. Swipe44 lists Pro at $2.99 a week or $29.99 a year, with a one-time $19.99 introductory offer. Cleaner Guru lists eight purchases under two names and attaches a billing period to none of them, so you cannot work out what a year costs before you install. That gap shows up in its recent reviews: reviewers say they were charged after expecting a free trial, that the paywall arrived after the scan and blocked the delete, and that the billing turned out to be weekly when they expected monthly or annual. Two numbers on this page look like they disagree, and both are dated September 2026: the lifetime average is 4.52, and more than half of the 500 newest reviews are one star.

No ads. Swipe44’s description says “No ads, no account needed”, and its 4+ age rating carries no advertising annotation. Cleaner Guru’s 4+ age rating carries “Contains Advertising”; its description does not mention ads either way.

A privacy label that matches the pitch. Swipe44’s label declares no data used to track you, and the app works from thumbnails so iCloud-stored originals are never downloaded. Cleaner Guru’s description says processing happens offline, per its listing, but its label declares Purchases, Identifiers and Usage Data used to track you, plus Contacts, Contact Info, User Content and Location linked to your identity. It also runs on iPhone only, with no iPad and no Android version from the same developer, while Swipe44 runs on iPhone, iPad and Android.

Pricing

• Swipe44 is free to download. What the free tier includes is not spelled out on the store page. Pro is $2.99 a week, or $29.99 a year with a one-time $19.99 introductory offer, after a 7-day free trial.
• Cleaner Guru: Clean Up Storage by GM UniverseApps Limited is free to download with in-app purchases. The listing shows Premium at $4.99, $6.99, $7.99, $8.99, $9.99 and $39.99, and Unlimited Access at $5.99 and $7.99. No entry names a billing period, and the description never says what either product unlocks.

A year of Swipe44 Pro is $29.99 at the standard price. For Cleaner Guru there is no way to price a year from the store page, because none of its eight prices is tied to a term. Reviewers describe the recurring charge as weekly at $7.99 to $9.99, but that is what buyers report, not something the store page states.

Which one should you pick?

Pick Cleaner Guru: Clean Up Storage if your phone is full of video as well as photos, you want your Gmail inbox and duplicate contacts handled in the same app, you need a password-protected vault, you read one of its 16 non-English languages, or you want an app with a long rating history. Reviewers say the paywall arrives once the scan is done and before you can delete, so check the subscription terms in the App Store purchase sheet, because the listing does not state them.

Pick Swipe44 if you want to clear the camera roll a photo at a time instead of trusting a bulk scan, want the subscription price and billing period visible before you install, want no ads and no account, or need the app on iPad or Android. Both apps appear in our roundup of the best photo cleaner apps if you want to see the rest of the field.

Before you install anything, try our free duplicate photo space calculator. It estimates how many gigabytes your duplicates are wasting and what that costs in iCloud+ or Google One each year. The photo cleanup time calculator works out how many sessions a full cleanup would take. Both run in the browser, with no download and no account.