Privacy Policy
for Phone Cleaner.

Who we are

Phone Cleaner is made by iHux Solutions FZ-LLC, a free zone company registered in the United Arab Emirates, trading as iHux (“iHux”, “we”, “us”). We are responsible for the app and for this website, and we are the seller shown on the App Store.

Questions about this policy, or about your data: support@phone-cleaner.com.

The short version

• Phone Cleaner does its work on your iPhone or iPad. Your photos, videos, contacts and private vault are never uploaded.
• There is no Phone Cleaner account. The app never asks for your name, email address or phone number.
• The app sends anonymous usage counts to our own analytics server — which features are used, never what is in your library, contacts or mail. Nothing the app reads is sent to us.
• There are no ads, and no tracking: nothing links what you do in the app to you, or to other apps and websites. We do not sell or share personal information.
• A few services do receive some data so the app can work: Google, only if you connect Gmail; Apple and RevenueCat, for purchases; Superwall, for the subscription screen; and our own analytics server, for usage counts. Each one is described below.

What the app accesses, and why

iOS asks for your permission before the app can reach your photos, contacts or camera. You can change each permission at any time in the Settings app.

• Photos and videos — to find duplicates, similar shots, screenshots, blurry photos and large videos, and to compress videos. The analysis, including sorting with AI, runs on the device with Apple’s own frameworks. Its results, such as which photos look alike, are saved in the app’s storage on your device. When a photo or video is stored only in iCloud, iOS downloads it from Apple’s iCloud when the app needs it, as the Photos app does.
• Contacts — to find and merge duplicate contacts, and to add contacts back from a backup you saved. Before a merge, the app saves a snapshot of your contacts as a file on your device (Automatic Backup, on by default). It keeps up to 20 snapshots, 100 MB in all. Snapshots sit in the app’s storage, so they are part of your own iCloud or computer backup of the device. They are not sent anywhere else.
• Camera — only to take photos straight into the private vault.
• Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode — to open the private vault. iOS does the check; the app only learns whether it succeeded. We never receive biometric data.
• Private vault — photos and videos you move into the vault are encrypted on the device with AES-256 (AES-GCM). The keys stay in the device’s Keychain, behind your vault PIN or behind Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode. The vault is left out of device backups, and we have no copy of it or of its keys.
• Safari — the Safari content blocker gives Safari lists of ads, trackers, cookie pop-ups and social widgets to block. The lists are built into the app. Safari applies them itself: a content blocker cannot see the pages you visit, and the app receives no browsing data.
• Gmail — only if you connect it. See the next section.
• Everything else the app keeps — your settings, your daily allowance, your lifetime totals, and the battery and storage figures the widget shows — stays on the device, in the app and in a storage area it shares with its own widget and Safari extension.

Gmail and Google user data

The email cleaner is optional. If you connect a Gmail account, this is exactly what happens.

• Signing in — you sign in on Google’s own page, in a secure sheet opened by iOS. The app never sees your Google password. It asks Google for one permission, gmail.modify, which lets it read and organise your mail and move messages to Trash or Spam. It cannot permanently delete mail, and it does not write or send email.
• No server in between — the app talks to Google directly from your device. There is no iHux server involved. Google’s access tokens are stored in the iOS Keychain on that device only, and are not included in backups. We never receive your tokens or your mail.
• What it reads — to list your senders, the app reads the metadata of the messages in your mailbox: the message ID, labels, date, size, the short preview Google provides, and the headers From, Subject, Date, Reply-To, List-Unsubscribe, List-Unsubscribe-Post and Authentication-Results. It also reads your Gmail address. It reads the full content of an email only when you open that email in the app; it is shown to you and not saved.
• How it is used — on the device, to group mail by sender, show how much space it takes, filter it, find each sender’s unsubscribe option, and flag emails that may be fake (from Gmail’s own sender checks and the Reply-To address). It is used for nothing else.
• What is stored — the metadata is saved in a file in the app’s storage on your device, so the next scan reads only what changed. Your Keep list (the senders and emails you chose to keep) is saved there too. Like other app data, that file can be part of your own iCloud or computer backup of the device.
• What it does to your mail, only when you ask — moves emails to Gmail’s Trash (Gmail deletes them for good after 30 days, and you can restore them before then), moves emails to Spam when you report them, and unsubscribes you from senders you choose.
• Unsubscribing — the app uses only the one-click method a sender publishes in its emails (RFC 8058). It sends a short request from your device straight to the sender’s unsubscribe address, with no cookies. The sender receives that request, as with any unsubscribe. Senders without one-click unsubscribe are shown as unavailable.
• Images in emails — remote images in an email you open stay blocked until you tap Load images. Loading them contacts the sender’s servers, which can tell the sender that the email was opened.
• Disconnecting — sign out in the Email tab: the app revokes its access at Google and deletes the stored metadata and Keep list from the device. You can also remove Phone Cleaner’s access at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions; the stored metadata then stays on the device until you sign out in the app or delete the app.

Phone Cleaner’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

In practice: Google user data stays on your device. It is not transferred to us or to anyone else, not used for advertising, not sold, not read by people, and not used to train AI or machine-learning models.

Purchases and the subscription screen

• Apple handles every payment. We never see your card or payment details, and Apple does not give us your name or Apple Account email.
• RevenueCat checks your purchase status, so the app can unlock your plan and restore it on another device. It receives the App Store transaction details of your Phone Cleaner purchases, a random app user ID created for this install, and basic technical data such as your IP address, iOS version, app version and region. The ID is not linked to your name or email. See RevenueCat’s privacy policy.
• Superwall chooses and shows the subscription screen. It receives a random ID of its own, basic device information (such as model, iOS version, language and app version), events about the subscription screen (for example shown, closed, purchase started or completed), and these values from the app: your plan (none, trial, weekly, yearly or lifetime), whether it will renew, whether a payment failed, whether you have had a plan before, and how many gigabytes the last scan found to clean, rounded. It receives none of your photos, contacts or emails. See Superwall’s privacy policy.
• RevenueCat and Superwall give us summary reports about purchases and the subscription screen. We use them to run the subscription and to choose which screen to show — never for advertising. The app also sends its own subscription-screen events to our analytics server (see Usage counts).

Usage counts

• To learn how many people use Phone Cleaner, which features they use and how the subscription screen performs, the app sends short usage events to our own analytics server, which runs OpenPanel, open-source software we host ourselves on a server in Germany, in the EU. No other company receives these events.
• The app sends a fixed set of events about which features you use. Where an event carries a number, counts are rounded to two significant figures and sizes are given in GB to one decimal place. An event never contains a photo, a file name, a contact, an email, a sender or anything else from your library or inbox.
• It also sends a fixed set of events about the subscription screen: what happens on it, such as whether a free trial or a purchase started, and why no screen appeared when none did. These say which screen it was and which test version we showed, using our own names for them. They never include prices, your Apple Account, or receipt or payment details.
• Each event carries the app version, iOS version, device model, language and region, and a random ID created when the app is installed. The ID is not linked to your name, email, Apple Account, Gmail account or your device’s advertising identifier, and it is reset if you delete and reinstall the app. Your IP address is used to estimate a country and is not stored.
• You can turn usage counts off at any time in the app’s Settings, with “Share anonymous usage counts”. It is on by default.
• We use these counts only to understand and improve the app and its subscription screen. They are not used for advertising, not combined with data from other apps or websites, and not sold or shared.

What leaves your device

This is the complete list.

This website

• phone-cleaner.com is hosted by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel processes your IP address and the details of each request (such as the page and your browser) to deliver the site and keep it secure, and keeps its logs for a limited time.
• To count visits, the site sends page views and clicks on outgoing links (such as the App Store button) to our own analytics server (OpenPanel, hosted by us in Germany). It sets no cookies: a visitor is counted through a hash of the request that changes every day, and IP addresses are not stored. We see totals only — pages viewed, referring sites, countries, and device and browser types.
• The site loads no advertising or tracking scripts. Its fonts and images are served from the site itself.
• The contact form does not send anything through this site: it opens your own mail app with the message ready. When you email us, we receive your address and your message, and use them only to answer you.

How long data is kept

• On your device — until you delete it in the app, or delete the app. Deleting the app removes everything it stored on the device, including the private vault, which cannot be recovered. Copies already in your own device backups follow your backup settings.
• Gmail metadata — until you sign out in the Email tab, or delete the app.
• Contact snapshots — the newest 20, up to 100 MB in all; older ones are removed as new ones are saved.
• Usage counts — up to 24 months, then deleted.
• RevenueCat and Superwall — according to their own privacy policies.
• Emails you send us — as long as we need them to help you.

Children

Phone Cleaner is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. The app sends us no personal information. If you believe a child has written to us, contact support@phone-cleaner.com and we will delete the message.

Your rights

Depending on where you live — for example in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates (under its Personal Data Protection Law) or California — you have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, deleted or handed over, and to object to or restrict how it is used. You can also complain to your data protection authority.

We hold very little: there is no account, and we never receive your photos, contacts, vault or mail. The data on your device is in your hands — delete it in the app, sign out of Gmail, or delete the app. For data held by RevenueCat or Superwall, or for anything else, write to us and we will help.

To make a request, email support@phone-cleaner.com. We answer within the time the law requires and never charge for it.

Under the GDPR we rely on these legal bases: performing our contract with you (providing the app and your subscription); your consent (connecting Gmail, and the permissions you grant in iOS); and our legitimate interests (running and securing the website, counting how the app and the website are used, and choosing which subscription screen to show). Our analytics server is in Germany. Google, RevenueCat, Superwall and Vercel are based in the United States; transfers to them rely on the safeguards those providers offer, such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

California residents: we do not sell or share personal information, as those terms are defined in the California Consumer Privacy Act, and we do not use sensitive personal information to infer anything about you.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will update this page and the date at the top. If a change affects how your data is handled, we will say so on this website and in the app’s release notes before it takes effect.

This policy is written in English. We also publish it in other languages for your convenience; if a translation differs from the English version, the English version applies.

Contact

iHux Solutions FZ-LLC (iHux), the United Arab Emirates — support@phone-cleaner.com.