Is downloading an 'iPhone Cleaner' recommended by Apple?

I would not recommend you install "clean up apps" on your iPhone.

That message you saw was a pop-up on a website by a random advertiser, not by Apple.

"Clean up apps" do not remove viruses off your iPhone or clean up your system storage space as advertised. They are rather useless and sit on your home screen and pretend to do something. Some can even slow your iPhone down. The worst ones will make you pay for it.

Apple doesn't recommend any such app. Anything similar to your message on the App Store is there only because it passed Apple's rules for inclusion. Not because it necessarily does anything useful.

Cleaning apps are worthless on both Macs and iOS devices. Particularly the latter. iOS is a sandboxed OS, which means third party apps cannot touch the contents of other apps.

What they can "clean" are things that don't need cleaning, or you can easily do yourself without an app. They tend to delete things that immediately get rebuilt. Like cache data and cookies for your web browser. And honestly, not a whole lot else.

And as IdrisSeabright noted, those that try to go further usually destroy things like your Photos gallery.

Based on the ads and scam ads I've seen for most "cleaner" apps, "anti-virus" apps, and the like, I would not be tempted to install them on my iPhone.

If the message told you that you have "viruses" on your iPhone, run away. Far, far away.

Even if it just claimed that the app will magically reclaim space on your iPhone without forcing you to delete any data (like photos, videos, music, etc.), I would be skeptical.

cheddar-caveman wrote:

Just had a message to download an "iPhone cleaner". Is this recommended by Apple? Is it a good idea?

Never used one before but is it worth doing?

For at least one of them, there have been numerous complaints about it deleting things it shouldn't have deleted and othewise messing up people's photos and data. Just don't.

Anything on the App Store is safe to download and use.