AVG Cleaner is a popular choice of app for Android users looking to clean up and tune up their mobile phone. It aims to clear the crud that builds up over time and aid smooth running.

It is debatable whether clean-up and tune-up tools are actually needed, but they are popular among Android phone owners and millions of people use them. AVG's is one of the most popular and it has a high rating in the Google Play Store.

The app offers a free mode that displays adverts and adds a few extra features, or you can use it for free if you don't mind the ads and just want basic cleaning and tuning features.

Analyse your phone

The home screen shows a large graphic in the top part of the screen and is animated to grab your attention. The Device Analysis report shows five space saving tips and the first of these is unnecessary data. It includes various types of caches and if the phone is short of storage, it can recover space by clearing them. They fill again afterwards, but at least for a little while you could have up to a gigabyte of extra storage.

The second tip shows the apps using the most RAM. Apps can be stopped if the phone is short of RAM and it is affecting performance. As with caches, RAM fills up again, but at least for a short while the phone will start and run the next few apps faster.

The next tip shows the app that has downloaded the most data. There isn't anything that can be done to stop it, apart from uninstalling it, but it is useful to know. You can decide whether it is worth keeping or if you can live without it.

Tip four lists the least used apps. We all have these and an app is installed from the store, used a few times, then we never run it again. Here you can see a list and select and uninstall them.

The most interesting tip is the last one and this is AVG's take on a popular topic at the moment, how much time we spend on our phones and what we do on them.

It lists all the apps on your phone sorted into order with the least used first and most used last. you can view usage statistics for the last 24 hours, 7 days and last 30 days. It is not quite as good as the Screen Time feature in iOS 12, but it is very interesting. The idea is that you can see apps you rarely or never use and either remove them or hibernate them (stops them running, but they can be revived). It is interesting to see where you spend all your time with this feature.

Android memory cleaning

The Memory icon on the home screen shows apps that are running in the background and there is the option to select apps you are not using and hibernate them. This stops them running when they are not being used, so they don't use the CPU, battery and other resources.

Optimise photo storage

The Photos feature is an interesting one and it scans the photo gallery on the phone and offers to optimise them. This replaces each image with a smaller version that looks just as good on the phone, but uses less storage space.

You don't want to lose your original photos of course, so if you have not backed up the images elsewhere, there is an option to connect cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive. Original photos are stored in these online drives before they are replaced with optimised versions on the phone. Gigabytes of storage can be recovered by optimising images.

Battery optimisation

There are some battery optimisation features that enable more life to be gained, but this requires an upgrade to the Pro version of the app. In the free version the options are limited to turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and Auto sync data.

Do you need a tune-up tool?

Whether you need an app like this depends on your phone and version of Android. You may find that your top-end phone with the latest, or at least a recent, version of Android has all the features anyway.

For example, on some Samsung phones the the Device Maintenance feature in Settings does most of what AVY Cleaner does. Cheaper phones and older phones are less likely to have clean-up and turn-up features built in, so AVG Cleanup is more useful. It is therefore recommended for many people, but it is not essential for everyone.

App: AVG Cleanup
Price: Free
By: AVG Mobile
Size: 23 MB
Android: 4.1 and up
Verdict: Good cleanup tools for phone that lack them