Around this time last year, I put the AI-assisted photo erasing tools on some of the best phones to the test to see which one performed best. While Apple’s Clean Up feature was intuitive to use, it wasn’t as good as Google’s Magic Eraser — and nowhere near the impressive results delivered by Samsung’s Galaxy AI Photo Assist. But now, Apple has given its version a much-needed upgrade in iOS 27, backed by what it calls “better quality and more realistic infill.”
Of course, I wanted to see how well this latest version of Clean Up performs compared to Samsung’s offering. For this iPhone Photo Cleanup vs. Galaxy AI Photo Assist test, I’m running the iOS 27 developer beta on my iPhone 17 Pro and One UI 8.5 on the Galaxy S26 Ultra. I then took photos I had previously captured on different phones and ran them through each device’s respective AI erasing tools. Can Apple finally prove it’s as capable as Samsung at removing unwanted objects? Here’s what I found.
