Search for ‘cleaner’ in Google’s Play Store and you’ll be inundated with icons bearing the hallmark brush against a variety of background colours. Clean Planner (www.snipca.com/52650) is no different, though its brush looks more like something Tom Sawyer would use to whitewash a picket fence than anything you’d find handy in a messy kitchen.
It has plenty of positive reviews and has shot into Google’s top 20 free tools. It also claims to be “the faithful butler of your mobile phone”, which made me wonder whether Ask Jeeves was making a comeback. I decided to give it a go, but was underwhelmed by its main tool, the Junk Cleaner, which found a measly 167KB of data to remove.
But before I even had the chance to proceed it blasted me with a full-screen advert for Norton 360 antivirus. That wasn’t so bad, but much worse was an ad trying to convince me my phone had been hacked (see screenshot 1 ). Such scare tactics are shameful.