Apple’s new developer beta of iOS 18 includes an artificial intelligence (AI) feature called Clean Up that uses machine learning to remove elements from your photos and tidy them up. If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like Google’s Magic Eraser, you’d be right – but some early testing shows that iPhones are still playing catch-up with their Pixel rivals.
To use the Clean Up feature, you need to have iOS 18.1 beta 3 downloaded on your iPhone. Then, open the Photos app, select an image, and start editing. You’ll see a new Clean Up button. The feature will suggest elements that could be removed from the image, or you can hover over an object and Clean Up will get to work.
The problem is that the results, at least in early beta, are rather unreliable. While Clean Up seems to do a good job of removing objects, it has trouble convincingly filling in the gaps left after the selected object is removed – something a comparison thread by @sondesix on X (formerly Twitter) illustrates quite well.
Compare that to Google Photos, which in addition to Magic Eraser also has its own AI-powered image cleanup tool called Magic Editor. This is also good at isolating and removing objects from images, but currently seems to be better at replacing the removed element with realistic, AI-generated content.
Unlike Apple’s Clean Up tool (which works entirely on-device), Magic Editor also lets you choose from several different results, so you can choose the best one rather than relying on a single AI-generated result.
Apple needs to catch up
With Apple’s Clean Up tool lagging far behind the competition from Google and others, it’s natural to wonder if the other Apple Intelligence features can keep up. Having tried out some of them myself (admittedly mostly on macOS), I can say that Apple Intelligence is a mixed bag at the moment. Some features impress, while others disappoint – or aren’t available yet.
This is all new territory for Apple, so it’s not surprising that the company is still trying to find its footing. We shouldn’t be too harsh on Clean Up, as it’s still in beta and could see some significant improvements in the coming weeks and months.
We’ve seen reports that many Apple Intelligence features could be delayed until the new year, so we shouldn’t be too surprised if one of them (Clean Up) needs some more work before it’s ready. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has also suggested that Clean Up in the Photos app could even get a “beta” label to begin with.
At the same time, Apple has stated that most of its Apple Intelligence features run on-device, meaning your information isn’t sent to Apple’s servers. That’s much better for your privacy compared to rival services, but it could limit the capabilities of features like Clean Up, and perhaps explains why it lags a bit behind its competitors.
Or it could simply be that Apple needs to catch up with competitors like Google, which have been developing such AI features for years. Whatever the case, we’ll find out in the coming months and years whether Apple can close the gap and improve its AI tools while still maintaining user privacy.
