Forty-eight creatives were still recorded in this category on 24 July 2026. Between them they use 25 different headlines, and 22 of those name photos, duplicates or contacts. Not one promises a faster phone. The app is called a cleaner, the ad sells a delete job on files you can picture.
We pulled every App Store ad twelve phone cleaner and storage cleaner apps ran across all 25 EU storefronts from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires. That is 3,401 ad records and 123 distinct creatives. Here is the survivor board, sorted by records tracked. The data window runs 25 July 2025 to 25 July 2026, and no storefront query failed on this sweep.
The survivor board
| App (publisher) | Storefronts | Distinct creatives | Oldest creative still running | Records tracked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner (DEEP FLOW SOFTWARE SERVICES) | 25 | 34 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Duplicate Photos Cleaner App", 23 storefronts, en-GB | 1,469 |
| Phone Cleaner Storage Cleanup (CoinCup OU) | 24 | 12 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Clean up cache,photos,contacts", 18 storefronts, en-GB | 855 |
| Cleaner Kit (BPMobile) | 16 | 21 | 297 days, "Schoon contacten en foto's op", 1 storefront (NL), nl | 718 |
| Cleaner Guru (GM UniverseApps Limited) | 11 | 15 | None. Everything stopped by 11 June 2026 | 170 |
| Storage Cleaner, Dedupify (Foobar Creative) | 19 | 13 | 162 days, "Doppelte Fotos schnell löschen", 2 storefronts (AT, DE), de-DE | 67 |
| Phone Cleaner: Swipe to Delete (Pravin Gondaliya) | 25 | 11 | 27 days, "Clean Photo Storage Space", 2 storefronts (DE, FR), en-GB | 62 |
| Phone Cleaner, Smart Clean Up (Thanh H Vo) | 18 | 2 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Clean, Delete Photos in Phone", 18 storefronts, en-US | 32 |
| Cleaner Guru Free Storage (Lilucat) | 7 | 8 | None. Everything stopped by 16 October 2025 | 12 |
| Storage Cleaner (Lilucat) | 9 | 2 | None. Both lines stopped 1 July 2026 | 9 |
| Boost Cleaner (CELESTIAN GOLDEN APPS) | 1 (Germany) | 2 | None. Both lines stopped 8 June 2026 | 4 |
| Phone Cleaner, AI Storage Clean (CEM SOFTWARE LTD) | 1 (France) | 2 | None. Both lines stopped 17 June 2026 | 2 |
| Smart Cleaner: Free Up Storage (NAICOO PTE. LTD.) | 1 (Sweden) | 1 | 5 days, "AI duplicate photos remover", 1 storefront (SE), en-GB | 1 |
Four readings of this table.
Three publishers are the category. Cleanup, Phone Cleaner Storage Cleanup and Cleaner Kit hold 1,469 plus 855 plus 718 records, which is 3,042 of 3,401, or 89 percent of everything recorded across the twelve apps. The bottom of the board is close to empty: Boost Cleaner has 4 records in Germany only, Lilucat's Storage Cleaner has 9, Phone Cleaner AI Storage Clean has 2 in France only, and Smart Cleaner has a single record in Sweden. Those four have no meaningful EU App Store ad volume recorded in this window, which is a statement about paid App Store search and nothing else.
One advertiser has not written a new line in a year. CoinCup OU's Phone Cleaner Storage Cleanup carries 855 records on twelve creatives, and eleven of those twelve are marked by Apple as older than its one-year window. Eight of the eleven were still recorded on 24 July 2026, including the English "Clean up cache,photos,contacts" on 336 records across 18 storefronts and its icon-only twin on 300 across 17. The one creative Apple can still date, a Spanish "Limpiar Fotos,Video,Contactos", started on 30 July 2025, five days into the window, and stopped on 5 May 2026. So the newest thing this advertiser started in a full year of data is from the first week of it. Everything else was already running before we could see it, and most of it is still running.
Cleanup relaunches instead of rewriting. On one day, 26 April 2026, Cleanup started eleven creatives. The headlines were not new: "Duplicate Photos Cleaner App", "Foto reinigen Duplikat löschen", "Supprimer Doublon Photos", "Dubbele foto's verwijderen", "Liberte Espaço no Telemóvel", "Radera dubbletter av foton" and "Liberar espacio, duplicadas" were all lines it had already run. Its two year-plus English creatives kept running through the same period, on 507 and 235 records. The pattern across 34 creatives is one set of headlines restarted in fresh campaigns, not new copy.
Cleaner Guru went dark. GM UniverseApps had year-plus lines in seven languages: German "Kontakte und Medien löschen", English "Delete duplicate photos & more", French "Nettoyeur de stockage, photos", Dutch "Foto's,contacten,video", Portuguese "Limpeza da Galeria e Email", Spanish "Liberar & optimizar espacio" and Swedish "Radera foton, kontakter, video". Most of them stopped in the first week of August 2025. The German pair and an Italian line started in October 2025, "Libera spazio, Pulisci foto", ran until 11 June 2026 and then stopped too. Nothing from this publisher was recorded after that date. An advertiser can hold year-plus creatives in seven markets and still be gone within a month of your looking.
Where these apps buy
App Store search results, with one exception in the whole sweep. Cleanup is the only advertiser here that also buys the App Store product page placement: 1,212 of its analyzed records are search results and 12 are product page. Every other app in the sweep is search results and nothing else.
The product page test is smaller than it sounds. Both product page creatives are the same German icon ad, "Foto reinigen Duplikat löschen", running in Germany only, one for 78 days to 28 April 2026 and one for 58 days to 23 June 2026. Neither was recorded on 24 July. The biggest advertiser in the category tried the second surface, in one market, in one language, and is not running it now.
What the surviving copy says
The live headlines name the file type. "Duplicate Photos Cleaner App" (Cleanup, 23 storefronts). "Delete duplicate photos fast" (Dedupify, 11 storefronts). "Photo Cleanup for iPhone" (Cleaner Kit, 8 storefronts). "Clean, Delete Photos in Phone" (Phone Cleaner, Smart Clean Up, 18 storefronts). "AI duplicate photos remover" (Smart Cleaner, Sweden). Fourteen of the 25 live headlines say duplicate in some language: "Foto reinigen Duplikat löschen", "Supprimer Doublon Photos", "Dubbele foto's verwijderen", "Radera dubbletter av foton", "Limpeza duplicadas fotos,video", "Pulisci foto e contatti doppi", "Doppelte Fotos schnell löschen", "Elimina le foto duplicate", "Supprimez les photos en double", "Apague fotos duplicadas rápido", "Verwijder dubbele foto's snel".
Three of the 25 live headlines sell space or memory rather than a named file: "Liberte Espaço no Telemóvel" (free up space on your phone, Cleanup, Portugal), "Rensa minnet och cacheminnet" (clean the memory and the cache, CoinCup, Sweden) and "Schnelles Entfernen von Caches" (fast removal of caches, CoinCup, Austria and Germany). All three are running. The speed words that do appear are attached to the delete, not to the phone: fast, schnell, rápido, snel, snabbt. Nobody in this sweep is buying search results with a promise that your device will run better.
Contacts turn up more than you would guess for a storage app. Cleaner Kit's live set is built on them: "Schoon contacten en foto's op" (297 days, Netherlands), "Fotos und Kontakte Löschen" (296 days, Austria and Germany), "Pulisci foto e contatti doppi" (133 days, Italy). CoinCup's oldest English line pairs them the same way, "Clean up cache,photos,contacts". Its French line is "Nettoyeur de contacts et photo", and contacts come first.
The apps with the smallest footprints write the plainest copy. Dedupify holds 67 records on 13 creatives and every one of its six live lines is a literal translation of the same sentence, delete duplicate photos fast, in six languages. It buys about one twenty-second of Cleanup's volume with the same message.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest performance signal you can get on a rival, and Apple publishes it for free. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that loses money, so a creative still running after a year is a creative that pays. Pull your closest rivals, sort every ad by how long it has run, and write your first creatives against the survivors rather than against the newest thing you happened to notice.
Two habits this category adds. First, read the concentration before you read the copy: 89 percent of the records here belong to three publishers, so a headline you find in the long tail may have run four times in one country and tells you nothing. Second, separate old from live. Thirty-five creatives in this sweep are past Apple's one-year window, and only eleven of them were still recorded on 24 July. Cleaner Guru had thirteen year-plus creatives and zero of them running. Age alone is not proof that something works, and the two columns have to be read together.
The last habit is to notice what the category refuses to say. Twelve apps, 123 creatives, and the winning message is delete your duplicate photos, in the local language, over and over. If you were about to launch here with copy about performance or a faster device, the data says the people spending the money gave up on that argument a while ago.
You can pull any advertiser at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute.
Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), swept across all 25 EU storefronts with zero failed country queries, data window 25 July 2025 to 25 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets, and "still running" means the creative was recorded on 24 July 2026, the last full day in the window. "Past Apple's one-year window" is Apple's own marker: it reports creatives older than a year as over a year rather than as a date, so we cannot date those ads more precisely than Apple does. A "creative" is one distinct ad grouped by placement, format, headline and asset count, which is why creative counts look high: the same headline usually appears twice, once as an icon ad and once as an icon plus asset ad. Record counts are repository records across the 25-storefront sweep, a proxy for volume, not euros. Apple caps each country query at about 50 records, so for the larger advertisers we analyzed fewer records than the repository holds (Cleanup 1,224 of 1,469, Cleaner Kit 610 of 718, Cleaner Guru 136 of 170), which is why we say records tracked rather than records read. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.