Plainclean privacy policy
Last updated 9 October 2026. En español
The short version: your photos stay on your iPhone. We have no accounts and never see your photos. The app sends us a few pseudonymous counts, like "a delete finished", so we know it works. The app shows no ads.
Who we are
Plainclean is an iPhone app made by 123TEQ LLC ("we"). Questions about this policy: use the contact form.
Your photos
With your permission, Plainclean reads your photo library on your iPhone to find near-identical shots, blurry and dark photos, screenshots and big videos. For each photo it works out a few numbers on the phone itself, with Apple's built-in tools: its size, how sharp and how bright it is, a similarity fingerprint, and for photos in a group of near-copies, how good the faces look. These numbers are kept in the app's own storage on your iPhone so the next scan is faster.
Your photos, and these numbers, are never uploaded to us or anyone else. Photos kept only in iCloud are not downloaded.
Plainclean never deletes anything by itself. When you choose photos and tap Delete, iOS asks you to confirm and moves them to Recently Deleted, where they stay for 30 days.
What the app sends us
To learn whether the app works, it sends our server (config.shovelware.ai) short event records:
- that a delete finished, with how many items and how many bytes (not which photos, and nothing about what is in them), or that one was cancelled;
- that a scan failed, if it does;
- the app version and "ios";
- a random number made by the app when it is first installed, so we can count installs. It is not your Apple ID, your device ID or the advertising identifier, and it isn't linked to you. Deleting the app deletes it.
The app sends nothing else and fetches nothing from the server. These records never include a photo or anything about one. We don't sell or share them, and we don't use them to track you across other apps or websites.
Advertising
The app shows no ads and contains no advertising code. It doesn't use the advertising identifier or any device identifier, and it doesn't collect your location. Nothing the app sends us is shared with advertisers or data brokers.
Children
The app isn't aimed at children and sends us nothing that identifies anyone.
Your choices
You can stop the app reading your photos at any time in iPhone Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos. The About screen in the app can forget everything it learned and start again. Because nothing we hold is linked to you, there is no account to delete. Deleting the app removes everything it kept on your phone.
Changes
If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of this page.