It’s an age old tale. Our smartphones, once shiny and chrome, become slow, decrepit bricks over the various periods of time. Some of us are lucky enough to have a phone that trudges on for 3 years before dying over night. Others are less fortunate, requiring a new smartphone after a few months. Therea are multiple reasons that could be attributed to our smartphones turning into expensive paperweights, a million apps, no space, etc. As the user, it’s often hard for us to monitor all these small facets that contribute towards the demise of our smartphones. Luckily there’s one app that can do it for us.
We know CCleaner as that program some of us install on our macbooks and desktops with the forlorn hope that it will speed them up miraculously. I can testify that when it comes to android devices, CCleaner delivers.
On starting CCleaner I’m given a simple analysis of my storage space and my RAM usage for my smartphone. A side bar will let you select the other built in feature of CCleaner called the App Manager. Also selectable from this sidebar is the option to view in depth information about your system such as your battery temperature, CPU usage, root status, etc. Overall it’s a nice, clean and simplistic interface. But let’s get to the main feature of CCleaner: the Cleaner itself.
First you’ll have to “analyse” your Smartphone, a step CCleaner goes through to find how to best optimise your smartphone to give it the legs it had a few hours after being unboxed. Shortly after my system was analysed, I was given a detailed, broken down and easy to understand description of what was taking unnecessary space on my phone. The junk data it detects was categorised into areas such as: the cache, empty folders, downloads, thumbnails, Google Play history, Google Maps cache, and more, allowing you to easily choose which to remove, unlike other cleaners, which indiscriminately remove all data. What’s more, through the app’s Settings, you can customize what kinds of data are analyzed.
Furthermore CCleaner comes with a great home-screen widget that enables you to clean your cache, clipboard, Web browser history, and processes without having to launch the app. The design of the widget is just like that of the app: clean, well-ordered, and uncluttered.
But on the of the best features is something CCleaner actually doesn’t have: ads. I can’t remember the last time I came across an app that did not feature ads of some sort placed all over its interface.
However great it is, there are some letdowns with CCleaner, specifically the app manager. For some reason the built-in app manager lists the default core applications of my Honor 6 Plus and gives me the option to uninstall them, something I found odd since the apps could not be deleted at all. Unfortunately this doesn’t stop CCleaner from attempting to do so, sending it into an endless cycle of trying to delete the undeletable app.
Other than that, I highly recommend CCleaner for anyone’s smartphone, be it slow or brand new, after all, prevention is better than cure.
