As much as I like playing around with MobileTerminal, it's probably not a good idea to run unreviewed Cydia apps in root (unless you have a really good reason to). Still, I am willing to use my iPhone as a Canary to test out iCleaner. iCleaner is an app which by default has a liberal definition of "junk data." Running the app from its SpringBoard icon will give you the works: iCleaner will delete partially downloaded Cydia packages, obsolete cache files; and delete cookies, browsing history and cache files from Mobile Safari and other apps (iCleaner has no problem detecting Instagram and Facebook). Depending on whether you find your cookies and history in mobile safari useful, you might not want to use this app to delete them wholesale. (The Cydia page for iCleaner promises it won't eat your your app login information, just junk data.)
If you want to finetune iCleaner's search for junk data, you have to run it through a terminal program as the root user. You can do this through mobileterminal with the command login root. It will ask you for your password, which is alpine by default. (If you use SSH: Change your default! Use passwd and write down a copy of your new password.) On a new line run iCleaner. Despite my concern, iCleaner didn't seem to do anything malicious to my phone.
From the terminal iCleaner presents you with some options: it can Analyze your phone's harddrive and tell you how much space it can free up, it can clean the device, view analysis/cleanup logs, and allow you to toggle some settings. The settings allow you to enable or disable confirmation at each step, clean up of Safari, application data, log files, cache files, temporary files, partial Cydia apt packages, as well as custom userdefined filetypes.
iCleaner found 326 MiB of junk data to delete from my iPhone. While that number is a 1% drop in my 32GB bucket, that does represent about 60 extra songs that I could be carrying with me. If you are strapped for space, you just might have room to download iCleaner. You can find iCleaner in the BigBoss repo for FREE on Cydia.
Do you have a lot of junk on your phone? Let us know how much wasted space you can save in the comments section below.
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