Ukrainian Software Engineer Yevhen Lavrynenko launched a new app called Prune for system cleaning and memory optimization on iPhones. He was inspired by the prevalence of aggressive advertising on social media for similar services with expensive monthly subscriptions and distrust of Chinese developers.
Ukrainian Software Engineer Yevhen Lavrynenko launched a new app called Prune for system cleaning and memory optimization on iPhones. He was inspired by the prevalence of aggressive advertising on social media for similar services with expensive monthly subscriptions and distrust of Chinese developers.
Lavrynenko told dev.ua about the creation of the application, his experience and development technologies. According to him, the idea for the project arose while observing the market of mobile utilities for iOS.
"If you use an iPhone, you often see ads for all sorts of gallery cleaners. They get a lot of negative reviews because of the way they are monetized and the fact that they don’t really help. What inspired me most was that there is a demand for such applications, but they all bite through subscriptions. And also that most of them are written by Chinese people — and because of my political beliefs, I don’t trust them," the IT guy shared.
According to the engineer, the development of the application took several days due to the active use of generative artificial intelligence.
"I used AI, in our time I consider it like being without hands. I used Claude Opus and Sonnet," added Yevhen Lavrynenko.
The main difference between Prune and most of its competitors is its monetization model and approach to privacy. The app offers a 7-day free trial, after which the user can purchase lifetime access for a one-time payment without being tied to regular subscriptions.
The service scans the device completely locally — without sending data to external servers, creating accounts, or registering. The utility’s main features include:
Find duplicate photos, similar frames, and burst shots using on-device image analysis algorithms.
Compress large video files with a choice of three quality levels ("Space Saving", "Balanced", "High Quality") and the ability to compare with the original before deletion.
Merge duplicate contacts by phone number or email with automatic data backup.
Encrypted storage for private media files, protected by a password or Face ID, which is excluded from iCloud backups by default.
The description pays special attention to the transparency of working with the operating system: the application warns that deleting files does not free up memory instantly through the system folder "Recently Deleted", and compressing a video does not delete the original without direct confirmation by the user.
Prune is already available for download in the App Store. Lavrynenko notes that if there is demand, he is ready to release a version of Prune for Android.
