To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple isn't already doing this and just doesn't say so explicitly. There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone photo. Would be interesting to compare a photo taken with the native camera app and photosynthesis to compare. I'm assuming your demo images on your site are the raw and processed images from your app that don't go through Apple's "secret sauce" processing pipeline.
Hijacking this comment because of this line that reminded me of something:
"There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone"
I bought the Pixel 10 because it said it had great zooming capabilities. After 5X (that means 10X), it's completely stupid. Basically it takes a very blurred photo and then tries to reconstruct it with AI. The final results are completely awful and really distant from reality.
In photos after you can toggle between the AI modified and original. The original isn't as blurry as the preview shown - there's still a lot of image stacking happening and it's often very decent in my experience.
Edited to add: I have a pixel 10 pro which has a better zoom lens, so I could be having a different experience than you...
Also have a 10 pro .. but the AI-enhanced zoom goes up to 100x and is actually pretty handy for working out what tiny things in the distance actually are ... even if it's only a representation of that thing. Often use it for identifying birds, boats, etc.
I think my p10p's 100x zoom is neat, but I'd strongly caution against using it for ID in any sense, or necessarily even treating it as a photograph. It will "straight up hallucinate" objects into existence, more of a creative interpretation of 100x digital zoom than an oracle into the identity of something far off.
Makes for a fine image if "looking good" is the objective (which it often is), but I wouldn't trust it to disambiguate anything uncertain.
The biggest of the "sharpening with AI" models, if you let 'em go, they'll turn you into a celebrity on accident.
If you go to the Topaz AI forums on Facebook, you'll see examples of where the AI sharpening tool went off the rails and turned a blurry photo of someone (typically the user who bought the software, who is trying to clean up their own photos) into whichever celebrity that is in the AI model who resembles them.
IE, it might turn a photo of YOU into a photo of Robert Downey Jr.
A couple years ago, we needed a good photo of my grandfather for a photo collage. The best photo I had of him was where he's sitting next to a very decrepit looking old woman (some family friend?). It really was a great composition, great lighting, background and pose but the old lady was killing the vibe. My wife is really skilled at Photoshop but removing this old lady would have been really difficult so we decided to try the generative fill, something she had never used before. She selected the lady and typed in "delete this person". Instead of deleting her, it creates this strange, human like being. We try again and again with different permutations of the same command. Most of the attempts just replace the old lady with a small asian child. Eventually we just try with a blank prompt and it gets it in the first go. The Asian child thing was really strange, it truly looked like the same kid but just slightly different appearance each time.
Also wonder how how long until photos are no longer court-admissible evidence because they get overwhelmed with the burden of the amount (and the cost) of the "non-AI" certification?
We've been living in the age of photoshopped photos for decades now. You can't just present a random photo as evidence without being able to back up its provenance.
As long as you know how to edit metadata, you can definitely fool minor “trust systems” like adjusters, police, etc. It’s a big gap. (For any future readers, no I have not done this and would never do it, really.)
The only solution I see is some kind of hardware-linked signature showing that the image was produced at a certain time, by a certain device. In theory, you could make this signature somewhat “provable” and anchored to a specific time by combining something like 1) the latest Bitcoin block hash, and 2) a blockchain anchor, thereby proving that the photo was taken within a certain time widow after the hash was known and before the anchor was published. But even that arrangement is highly susceptible to hardware attacks.
The ENHANCE meme used to drive me nuts because it is clearly impossible. My brother and I even briefly competed to find the earliest ENHANCE reference (I no longer remember what we concluded, but it goes surprisingly far back). The fact that it actually exists now is mind-boggling (even though it is, by necessity, still a fiction).
No, 10X is fine - there is enough resolution on the sensor to just crop the 5x images to 10x without any weirdness.
After 10x it's all over. Which is in itself quite insane. The camera is truly amazing, and complaining that this 10mm thick camera is no good at further than 10x seems utterly spoiled and ridiculous to me.
Yes exactly, the site shows photos all taken from within the app. I have done A/B tests against photos taken in Camera.app and the Photosynthesis composite does significantly beat the detail central area covered by the second lens in Photosynthesis.
Because of the limitations of capturing multiple lenses at once through isVirtualDeviceConstituentPhotoDeliveryEnabled, there is a second capture mode in the app for 'Quality' which takes a simultaneous capture then takes sequential shots from each lens which do benefit from Deep Fusion, then uses those for the stitch (as long as the Deep Fusion images outperform the simultaneous capture results). That's also what I do for our Night mode.
Phones have been doing this for a LONG time, if you had a oneplus 7 pro (released may 2019) and took it into an extremely dark area, like where your eyes can't see anything at all, and take a 'night mode' photo, it asks you to hold it steady for about 4-5 seconds and is clearly taking a series of photos with long exposure time. Then it stacks them and uses data from the sensor of hand movement jitter to deblur.
The result when done outdoors (like, standing in a dark forest at midnight) will be a photo where you can actually see what's around you, and details show up as if it was a brightly full moon lit night.
I know, I just don't think it's a huge jump from "take multiple photos over a 2s period from one camera and stack them" to "take several photos from discrete physical cameras and stack them". As a subscription of paid app I am not the target market for the person who made this, I agree with another person commenting in here that said they should be working for a phone manufacturer.
I’d argue the opposite. The geometry involved in reconciling photos from two separate lenses with different focal lengths is quite challenging. If you pay close attention you will see some differences in the before/after samples in the site (for example the ear in that kitchen selfie).
The math is surely more complex than aligning same-lens photography even when you consider the change in angle and perspective between two shots from the same lens.
Not really. Whether you have two different lenses or the same lenses with some offset from hand movement you need to accurately model the lens(es). Once you can do that for one lens you can just as easily do it for two - it's just more variables to optimize, not a fundamentally harder problem. Panorama software has supported images from different lenses since forever.
The Amazon Fire Phone did this in 2014. I'm not aware of any prior art in mainstream devices aside from gimmicks like 3D (stereoscopic) photos. I can't remember if the Fire Phone had any relevant gimmicks but it certainly used multiple lenses to produce a single image.
UAV sensor people made a thing that uses 300+ phone size sensors in a single pod, and software workflow to fuse the output together. It's been around quite a few years now.
Night Sight appeared on the Google Pixel camera app in 2018. I think Nokia was doing it first on phones before Microsoft destroyed the remains of their phone business.
The reborn Nokia/HMD was also doing multi-sensor image stacking back in 2019 on the Nokia 9 Pureview.
It's different from just stacking exposures, it's a paid app that does progressive animation of exposures for creative effect and says it's "AI-powered" whatever that means.
It's a paid app that I literally have, and all it does is take multiple photos and composite them together. It can either naïvely average them together in-place like a traditional long exposure, or align them using machine learning. I'm actually appalled they use the term "AI" considering who they are but that doesn't matter, it's ML. I don't use any of the animation crap, but the aligned long exposures can be useful for ultrawide takes since that camera is so noisy.
Edit: actually I can't seem to find the setting that aligns them. I seem to remember it being able to do that but maybe it doesn't... which would be disappointing...
> I'm actually appalled they use the term "AI" considering who they are but that doesn't matter, it's ML.
I agree, and I built it!
The app launched in 2019. Ideally I would have said ML, but it felt like AI had more recognition among non-technical users.
If I launched it in 2026, it would 100% say "ML" not only because it's more technically accurate, but to make it abundantly clear it doesn't generate slop.
I use iPhones (paid for by work) as a tool for my agronomy job. I take a large amount of photos throughout the day to help document what I find in the field.
Since at least the iPhone 12, holding the phone still and letting scene sit for a few seconds will result in a sharper photo. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle version focus stacking or a sharpening algorithm, but it’s definitely there.
On my 16e, immediately looking at a photo just taken can result in the image noticeably sharpening after a second or 2, so this may be a post processing step as well.
From what I can tell, it's taking multiple photos and stacking them in post. So giving the phone more time to capture sharp exposures to stack would do a lot to help.
Reading title and this ^ comment before loading the page made my brain assume that this is about combining front and rear image sensors, and additionally using eye/facial tracking to infer user intention + satisfaction to help with stabilization/framing/post-processing. I'm glad(?) we aren't there yet.
One time I took a photo of a snake in the road with my iphone in low light. When I looked at the photo afterwards the snake was removed by the AI enhancement
If that's the case then it would disprove the original assertion that Apple already does the same thing. You can't have the same high detail at the edges without making shit up because those parts of the image are out of frame for the higher zoom lens.
Somewhat related... I made an indie app called TwinCam which combines front-and-back camera images to create a combined selfie. Free. No strings attached. Cheers!
I have a Motorola moto g stylus 2025. I have not altered the OS or installed a custom rom. I simply have not signed into Google yet. I use aurora store to download and install app updates from the play store. What I'm curious about is why some apps won't even open at all without a Google log in? Is there something in your app that requires a Google account?
Thank you! I'm quite a new dev so honestly I don't know where to pitch the free tier, and I'm not above changing it. Do you have any suggestions for the free tier?
This is hardly convincing. A $99/yr fee and a once every 2 years update doesn't warrant a monthly subscription fee from every user. Eg a $9.99 app could cover those costs with a few dozen downloads
Might be. But as an Indie developer and maintaining app is just not the app developer and maintenance. Upgrades and the development requirements around it are costly and needs constant upgrades!
I'm not justifying, but trying my best to bring the reality. The time spent on development, hardware costs, licensing costs, design costs etc, are to be factored.
If people are working on a full-time job and trying to create something in the free (!!) time (it still needs to be valued for the time and effort!) and they could chose to or not to charge for the app. It's more personal and a general view.
IMHO, any and all subscription fees are justified based on the thoughts of the developer and how he values his effort, time and development complexity.
Not stating anything about it even if it is not appealing or convincing. It is purely a personal choice and the dynamics of value, usage, benefits, cost and the problem it solves from the buyer's side will also kick into the thought process and decision making.
I'm just saying only one side of the story and want to record my thoughts. Peace out!
I’ve been at it over a decade now and still found the only reliable way to make money from offline App Store apps is good old fashioned paid apps, $2.99 being a nice sweet-spot.
If you had customers buying last year, it’s likely you’ll have even more customers buying next year. If you stop maintaining your app, that stream of new sales almost immediately dries up.
Offline mobile apps which charge a subscription are a very silly fad to me. The few that get away with it are being steadily edged out by someone else who wants to eat their lunch.
I love the OP’s idea and absolutely see the use case. I also think it’s very promptable. My unsolicited advice is to strike while the iron’s hot at $0.99, because I’d be very skeptical if they’ll attract enough subscribers before getting starved out by copycats.
Why can't we be just... done? Why is software development a never ending treadmill? App does what it's supposed to, the developer earns something (or doesn't), and they can I dunno, abandon it if it wasn't successful enough and the API breaks, without any guilt? Do something else with their life?
OK? That's just the reality of business. You launch something and then need to do marketing to keep getting it in front of people until word spreads around that your app is a must-have thing for whatever it does and you get a decent number of sales every month.
In general, when I buy something I want to pay for it once and then have it. I don't want to rent or lease it, even if it's consumable. When I eat a restaurant I I pay for the meal when it's over; if it was delicious I might come back again. Even if I like it so much that I eat there every week, that doesn't mean I want a weekly subscription.
A restaurant can do just fine by making you a good meal every week, knowing you'll come back and pay them for each meal.
An engineer with an app can come to work 365 days a year, fix bugs, add nice new features, unbreak the app every time iOS updates, and, though you use the app every day, they can't count on you to give them another $5 every year - or ever again - unless you enter into a subscription.
This isn't to say you have some obligation to do a subscription to any app you don't think is worth it, but for apps from non-scam developers, they're usually like $20 or less a year - about a nickel a day. A nickel is 3¢ in year-2000 dollars btw.
It's on the developer to prove to you that the app is worth paying a nickel a day to have! But ruling it out just because we wish it didn't have to be, well, that just rewards the developers who monetize exclusively with ads or sell their 'free' apps to sketchy operators.
I'd like it if Uber was free or just cost a buck a ride flat rate, but I know that anyone willing to give me a ride on terms like that is probably looking to rob me.
Who expects 'nice new features' from an app they already decided to buy? Keeping the app compatible with new OS releases is necessary to keep sales going.
After a year, I don't think anyone is bothered if an app becomes unsupported for whatever reason. Usually what happens is the opposite - developer unnecessarily cripples an existing, perfectly working app, to try to milk some more revenue out of it.
This is an especially moot point now that most platform API upgrades are $1 of LLM work away.
> Who expects 'nice new features' from an app they already decided to buy?
I was just listing one more thing a developer who wasn't slacking might spend his time doing, that's all.
> Keeping the app compatible with new OS releases is necessary to keep sales going.
Relying on constant sales to new users sounds like a pyramid scheme. Software licenses don't wear out like shoes or become consumed like butter, with happy customers returning to buy more. Eventually, most of the people that need most apps have bought it and sales don't "keep going" more than a trickle, except for apps that are such mainstream hits that your new users are just "everyone who became old enough this month to get their first phone." And because the App Store has ruined organic discovery, paid apps rely almost exclusively on paying for installs either via Apple's ads or elsewhere. So, that eats a good part of each new sale's revenue right away.
Check the iOS top charts right now. For paid apps, the top-selling app is Shadowrocket, a rule-based proxy utility. How long until all developers who want a rule-based proxy utility have already paid the $3? If 100,000 developers buy that app, then that developer nets $210,000 pre-income-tax. About on par with a good corporate SWE job outside of FAANG. But that will slow down. There just aren't that many people who are looking for that. #2 is just a client of a subscription service for businesses. #3 is AnkiMobile Flashcards at $25. See, at that price I agree it can afford to never charge again. #4 is an ephemeral app for some art event in Portland so it doesn't need to be sustained. #5 is Procreate Pocket. I guess there are enough new aspiring artists appearing every day who can afford these apps (I think it's $13 for iPad).
> After a year, I don't think anyone is bothered if an app becomes unsupported for whatever reason.
Okay, so subscribe to the apps you use, and then immediately go in and turn off renewal in Settings -> (your Apple ID) -> Subscriptions. There. You now have a one-time purchase of an app which will stop working in a year - just like apps that have no recurring revenue stream do.
> This is an especially moot point now that most platform API upgrades are $1 of LLM work away.
I don't think you are a developer of serious iOS apps. Just the visual changes, that users expect apps to go along with, require major redesigns. People don't buy apps that look like they were designed in 2019.
We seem to be arguing at cross purposes. I am not saying that software is not worth paying for. $20 seems a very reasonable price for an application if it meets a customer's needs, and the only expectation I have beyond that is that it continues to work across OS updates. I'm OK with big version upgrades being a separate sale.
It's not the amount of the payment. It's the subscription model I can't stand. You're correct that I might use an app I like every day. But the marginal cost to the developer of me using it every day is $0. Rather than belabor the restaurant example , consider a book or a music CD. Writing books or recording music is generally a slow and difficult process, it takes months to produce one that might be read in a weekend. But if you buy a book, you can read or refer to it every day without paying again, or you cna listen to your favorite songs as often as you like by playing the CD. Nowadays many people prefer to stream music, but I think when people buy a book (even an e-book), they consider that it's their copy to read as often as they want...
...or not. If I buy a book and I don't like it, or later I find another book that I turn out to prefer to the first one, I can just not read it again. I don't have to cancel a subscription for the book.
This is where I get to with a lot of non-crazy people (the crazy ones just won't pay for software). Since you are fine paying $20 for a useful app, a $7 a year subscription can be better than a $20 one-time purchase in meaningful ways.
It aligns your incentives with the developer very well. They really want you to not cancel your subscription after only paying the first year's payment (when you may not have even paid back the customer acquisition cost!), and you want the app to be high quality and well-maintained. If the developer doesn't meet your bar for that, you cancel the subscription with 4 taps and they lose future income. That incentive to please customers after the sale just doesn't exist in a pay-once app world (except in tiny niches of old-school developers, like the Panics of the world, whom I do greatly respect).
Besides the incentives, it also gives you a chance to, after that one-year $7 spend, re-evaluate "do I even use this anymore?" If you paid for a guitar tuning app and you stopped playing guitar, you can just cancel the subscription, even before you've paid the amount that they'd have priced it for one-time-purchase. There is upside for the consumer in the apps that either let you down, or that you simply realized you no longer need, and it lowers the risk bar to try an app that you aren't sure about.
I get that if you do end up using such an app for the next 15 years, yes you'll probably pay somewhat more than any price you'd have considered paying one-off, but it also probably means that app (an app you use often for decades) couldn't have been sustained for all that time with only new customer installs paying the bills.
> if you buy a book, you can read or refer to it every day without paying again, or you cna listen to your favorite songs as often as you like by playing the CD.
We agree that this is all very great. And since the music or book you buy carries zero support burden of any kind from the artist it's a pretty great model - after their album launches the artist can devote 100% of their bandwidth to producing new music, or they can tour to get recurring income out of the same music, or a mix of the two.
You're using a device with an ever-evolving OS that constantly breaks compatibility.
If you paid for it once and only got to keep the version of it as of when you paid for it, in a couple years the platform would remove your ability to use it.
Don't want new features, and don't need an upgrade then stick with it. If you need the new version, then pay a partial amount of the app for the upgrade?
Even when you paid for software in the Good Old Days it was guaranteed to be compatible with ONE version of your OS, e.g. Windows 95. When you upgraded Windows, you'd often need to buy a new edition.
Even that's not really true. Most software that ran on Windows 95 could be run without modification or even a single update on both Windows 98 and Windows ME. Even XP preserved compatibility for most programs, adding explicit compatibility modes you could enable for an application that wouldn't work out of the box.
So, in the old days, you paid often $50-500 for a piece of software and the developer would usually have zero burden to update the software for you. By the time the OS completely broke it, it would have been 5+ years later. All that time, the developer was freed up to build and sell whole other applications, or, to innovate new and compelling features to get you to pay the upgrade price to get a new version.
Today that developer would have to do 5 major updates with breaking API changes, and probably at least 1 full visual refresh just to keep up with Apple's changing design whims, just for that one app to not be bricked. They have less bandwidth then to build more apps, since each app carries its own annual burden of churn.
Yes they do need it to be maintained because they update their phone and any apps that don't keep up can no longer be used unless the dev does more work.
In 1995 or even 2001, this was a completely reasonable line. Most software was written for Windows, and Microsoft clearly considered it taboo to break old software, whether their own or third-party. You could install Office 95 on Windows XP if you really wanted to, which didn't seem unreasonable, as you spent $300+ on the suite.
Giving this advice to developers today is frankly absurd career advice.
1. Few apps can achieve the scale needed for a one-time fee to be sustaining for the app - most apps appeal to a finite set of people, and eventually most who are in your target market (and who are willing to spend actual upfront money), have bought the app.
2. An entire generation has grown up that has never paid more than maybe 99 cents for software, and most refuse to even pay that - they're used to adware. You can't price an "app" at $75 and expect it to be bought by essentially anyone. While adware can actually be a very financially viable route, many developers hate ads and want nothing to do with this model.
3. Unlike the multiple years of stability of old desktop operating systems, platform owners today think nothing of breaking even a plurality of apps with any major OS version - and for some insane reason they also think a new "major version" ought to come out annually.
If you want apps that cease getting updates after a few months and age very poorly, or just to have no choices out there besides adware, keep boycotting every developer who uses a subscription, regardless of how cheap it is.
If you want apps that are diligently maintained and which keep working forever, reward developers who produce apps with reasonable subscriptions. I have a password manager that's $19 a year and covers my whole family, and a podcast player that's $15. That password manager comes out to a nickel a day.
I wouldn't have enough time in the day (or month) to use 30 apps, or even 10, once you subtract all the first-party ones and ones that are just interfaces for things that are monetized separately (grocery store app, restaurant app, Uber, etc).
I have 3 paid subscription apps.[1] Total cost $43 a year. My only point was that if there's an app that is useful why shouldn't you pay a small amount per year that sustains it, guaranteeing that it gets good attention from a developer who is accountable not to their advertisers, but their users.
[1] Note: That doesn't count streaming services, but my family paid for cable 30 years ago and that was fine. It's entertainment.
I shouldn’t pay because I’ve already paid. Price updates for the same major version in. Let new sales be your incentive to keep it up-to-date. Let a new version I actually want be my incentive to spend more money.
Subscriptions for software that don’t offer an external service put all the incentives backwards strictly to the benefit of the developer and expense of the user.
There’s no question why it’s a great deal for the developer. But nothing you’ve said explains why any user should buy into this at all.
I'm not principally opposed to subscriptions, but subscribing to a camera app is absurd.
Your post prompted me to donate to KeepassXC, my subscriptionsless password manager, because I would be sad if that went away, and I would hate if the software landscape became even more a subscription hell than it already is.
I think the less frowned upon way to charge is to just do it once.
If the Apple store supports this, free trial + one time payment sounds like a good way. Don't optimize for freeloaders, as someone else said.
If the app relies only on iPhone hardware and/or is not a live service, an account/subscription should not be required. Even non-devs might justifiably ask "why do I need a subscription for a camera app".
Halide asks for a subscription. Not entirely sure why yet. Yes, it is more advanced than the normal app. Also slower and I haven’t noticed any changes or improvements in the last two years. Maybe support for new features in newer iPhones.
As for the subscription, there’s always been a pay-once option for major releases. You just miss out on a free trial, the beta program, and anything we might release with ongoing costs.
Halide's subscription system seems to have broken since late 2024/early 2025 — my v1 purchase with a different Apple ID from the one I'm usually logged in with (different country/region) wasn't being recognised.
When I emailed in, they blamed it on how the App Store mechanism changed.
Halide somehow is the only app that has this issue.
We switched to Apple's StoreKit 2 framework, which uses different internal plumbing. Not only is it the recommended way moving forward from Apple, but it improves the user experience for purchase management.
The issue is that, indeed, it actually validates that the App Store account currently logged in purchased the app. I believe this is intended behavior, as it closes a piracy loophole where you could log into the Apple ID of a friend, download all their paid apps, and then log in to a different account while retaining access.
If other apps don't run into this problem, it's possible they haven't moved on to StoreKit 2. Or the app has their own login independent of app subscription; setting aside the time it would take me to build that, I don't think most people are willing to create an account to try a camera app.
They offer both a subscription model and a lifetime purchase. Or that used to be the case, at least. But I agree that it feels like it's getting behind.
They just released a major update, but it's not something I would pay a subscription for. I paid the lifetime fee in it's early days, but that doesn't unlock the new updates sadly.
I use Analogue for day to day capture, and NoFusion and Moment apps for things I will want to edit later. All with one-time purchase. I don't mind paying for quality apps, but I do have subscription fatigue now.
There is still a lifetime purchase for the new version, IIRC. I can see it in the App Store IAP section. (Which is so useful! Lets me filter for apps that have a lifetime option at all.)
Also, I just checked, I purchased Mark II lifetime and got Mark III for free. It's only Mark I users that didn't get it.
Unfortunately it looks like lifetime users don't get access to the beta program for whatever reason. I guess they don't want feedback from those users.
I tried Analogue too, but I stopped using third-party camera apps altogether because they all seem to suffer from an issue where if you lock the phone too quickly after taking a photo, the photo is lost forever. I lost so many photos to this that I knew I took.
Apple limits TestFlight to 10,000 testers. Folks who are paying a recurring fee expect to see more frequent updates, so they get priority.
Halide shouldn't be afflicted by the lost photo issue you're talking about. Normally, if you close a lock-screen extension before a photo is written, it won't be in your library. This can be a problem when the user quickly smashes the capture button and your photo queue gets backed up.
Luckily, the unlocked app gets a chance later to access the content of lock-screen capture sessions. So our strategy in Halide is to write the intermediate files to disk as soon as you initiate a capture; this should take a split second. When we have uninterruptible time, later, we make sure the photo finished writing to your library, and if not, we try again.
However, Apple's documentation isn't clear if the OS will "wake-up" your main app to process unfinished photos, or if it relies on the user launching the app. I'll just say that I dog-food Halide every day by capturing photos of my toddler, and I can't remember the last time I lost a shot.
At this point, I don't remember if I was using Halide from the lock screen or not, but I lost tons of photos because apparently I turned the screen off before the photo finished saving to the library. Halide forgot about it, and even after reopening the app, it was gone forever. This would only seem to happen when I turned the screen off quickly after taking the photo.
These days, I use the regular Camera app because I need my damn photos to save. I loved Halide, but that bug made it too unreliable. I get very distressed by data loss and couldn't continue to risk it while trying to develop a way to work around it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with charging, even if you vibe coded it. You clearly put a lot of effort into the design and concept.
As I said in more detail below, on a free tier I expect to be able to at least try it out in a normal way. a monthly limit of exporting 3 pictures (eg to look at on my computer or TV) seems like something a normal person would hit in the first 30 minutes of just exploring what it does. Now, I noticed you run it this way for 14 days, but I gotta say that on first view this was massively outweighed by the 3/month limit.
subscription-wise, I just don't like them. If you are doing a ton of server-side processing, I'd rather pay on an as-needed basis. If not, I'd rather just Pay $19.99 (or whatever price you determine to be competitive in the market for photo apps). I see why subscription income would be nice to have for you, but for me it's a financial leaky faucet. In that case, I'd prefer to just go without because the app is a fun thing to have rather than a professional need.
It also bothered me that it was described as a 'reasonably priced' subscription. If I don't see a $ sign and a number, I reflexively classify it as a scam even though rationally I know you're just testing the waters. I close or dismiss 10 or 20 things a day after a cursory glance into whether they're worth my time or money: fear of being ripped off (FOBRO) outweighs the fear of missing out (FOMO).
My suggestion is be generous and make a bit less money as the cost of making the world a kinder and more pleasant place. There's no rule that says you have to play ruthless capitalist.
I said: note that you are not obligated to maximize profit and you can give away more features for free and that it generally makes the world a kinder place to do so.
The point being that they have a choice. Contrary to what people are saying they are supposed to do, charge as much as possible, they can still choose to do something else. This is of course the normal mindset everywhere else, but HN seems to forget about it.
I wouldn't worry - there are some customers you don't want (and that's fine). Apps require a fair bit of upkeep and I imagine a camera app will need testing/modifying to ensure it works with the camera in every annual phone release. If you want to capture people who don't want a subscription add a lifetime plan 2-3x the annual price. Almost nobody will buy it. People complain about subscriptions but back in the day the number of people that complained when an app with 99¢ and not free was also staggering.
So what you're saying is that you prompted Claude to produce the app for you and now you're charging for it? A bold move, but I wouldn't expect much returns before there's completely free apps doing the same thing
Don’t listen to him, people like that will always complain, yet will never upgrade or pay for your product. He does not have a problem with your price but the mere fact that you are trying to sell something. Devs are like that.
Just differentiate signal from noise. Listen to your target audience not random internet comments
Wrong. I would definitely pay for this and was interested in it precisely because I just bought n iPhone. I spend $500-1000/year on software.
But if there's a free tier I want to try out normal use patterns over the course of a week or a month, and I prefer one-time payments or token purchases to subscriptions. I do the latter only for my IDEs, and still don't like it that much.
My objection was to the free tier only allowing one to export 3 images a month. That seems bizarre to me, since in course of trying something for the first time you might make 5, 10, or 20 images in an hour. If I'm running into a monthly limit in the first few minutes of using a tool, my immediate reaction is that it's something I can live without.
Nothing in the app is gated from day 1, you get 14 days of unlimited use before the choice of free vs paid is even presented, with no need to sign up for an official "free trial", so you have a good amount of time to make your mind up.
Nah man I’m not paying a subscription for a camera app that runs locally with zero need for cloud/servers/etc. beyond hosting their core product. I have paid as much as $50 for an app before (Artemis).
After I buy it I am zero burden to them beyond occasional updates, which I have very modest expectations of. They are far more likely to get my money if it’s one time. I can’t imagine paying a subscription for a physical camera, let alone a camera app on hardware I already paid a lot for
If you have an enormous addressable market then it can pay to build awareness as quickly as possible. Having lots of enthusiastic users will do that. Having a useful free tier is a pretty uncontroversial way to get those users.
Plenty of apps do this - looking at the first browser tab I have open I see gmail which does exactly this.
For a pure client app like an iphone app, you don't have any real "per user" costs, so there are no concerns about going under from the costs of attempting this. It would be very different if you had to pay for server capacity.
It would have been nicer if the examples wouldn't have been digitally altered to exaggerate the results. For instance, the center of the third photo has been intentionally blurred in the "standard photo" version.
The fact that they have to resort to manipulation to sell their product tells me that they are not trustworthy and that their product is probably underwhelming.
It’s weird, because the center of the image will be more detailed, so how are they dealing with the “grid of pixels” that is on the display. Are they doubling up the wide angle.
“Easy-to-understand framing
The brackets over the viewfinder indicate the area covered by the more detailed lens. Frame your subject inside them to capture the best detail.“
Reminds me of the old 3d cameras that took two photos at once through 2 lenses (on film)
I'm scaling the wider 'outer' image using Core Graphics 'CGInterpolationQuality' to avoid blocky pixellation, then feathering the seam between the two lens outputs so the transition isn't jarring.
I didn't know about those Nishika stereo cameras, that looks incredible!
Each camera has a different optical system with a different focal length range. This lets the camera cover everything from ultra wide angle to telescopic magnification while remaining thin enough to fit in a phone.
Phones can't fit a zoom lens with moving elements. The other cameras are just other prime lenses so you aren't restricted to having a single focal length all the time.
When you hit the little 0.5x, 1x, 4x buttons in the camera app you are switching between the physical cameras. Though Apple goes out of their way to obscure what is actually happening.
The obvious issue with the product here is that the telephoto lens will not cover the whole image that the 1x captured so only some portion of the center of the frame will be higher resolution.
Definitely not peak, my kid asked for a Rubik's Cube solver app which turned out to be subscription based, then wanted to tune her Ukelele with an app which turned out to be subscription based.
That's what makes me sad about the current Tetris game, on iOS.
One of my favorite games ever, and I'd gladly pay for an ad-free version, but they don't have it. I assume there's much more money to be made with ads, over subscriptions.
It's not that rare for games to offer a "remove ads" option for a few bucks. That model doesn't require a lot of extra "maintenance".
I think a few bucks for ad-free brings in more money for most developers, but that still pales in comparison to a recurring subscription model (or models where people keep spending in-app on consumables).
This sort of nonsense is what I think will drive adoption of AI for personal apps. Tell it to create a ukulele tuning app and you get one without ads without subscription that you can make work exactly how you want. I wonder whether this is something that only privacy and tech oriented folk will do and care about our whether it will be adopted generally.
The source of this problem is that it costs $99/year + the churn of having to keep up with the latest ios api updates to have an app for iphones. Which kills the normal free software that would have filled this role. As well as the fact that the subscription apps can pay for adverts to sit at the top of the search results.
Once governments force Apple to allow sideloading we should get some kind of f-droid for ios which only lists open source user respecting apps.
Only applies to Android. Apple make it deliberately expensive to publish apps and deliberately annoying to run your own apps locally (have to refresh every 7 days).
This is why some hardware is still supreme. I've had the same Korg chromatic tuner for 20 years and would not be in the least bit surprised if it goes for another 40.
There was some video on reddit that I saw the other day where a man struggled to take a photo with his camera app because it kept popping full screen ads in front of everything else.
There is Halide which I find completely uninteresting because I have a Sony A7iv. (Funny my latest piece of “gear” I am learning to use is a selfie stick because I can do stuff like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/selfie and I don’t see third party apps really improve on the official camera)
There's nothing to copy. Apple's iOS Camera app already uses multi-camera image fusion in many cases. This app builds on the Multi-Camera AVCapture feature that Apple opened up in iOS 13.
Apple has done this (multi-camera/spatial fusion) since 2016, in addition to multi-frame/temporal fusion. The OS decides whether these techniques are worthwhile for any given shot based on context.
Recently, Samsung introduced the ISOCELL platform which allows to select the area which will be recorded at higher resolution compared to other regions.
There can be all sorts of different applications build around such as extracting higher resolution of text regions, etc [2].
Of course, the lens needs to support this resolution but I think that will be default in the mid-term future.
The real answer: making money on the App Store is extremely difficult. Developers have worked out subscriptions make more money than one-off purchases over time, even if a large % of people will refuse to engage with them.
There are fashion subscriptions. Some people do not value being able to continually rewear clothes and would prefer to constantly having new clothes to show off.
That's absurd. I've gotten value from my toilet plunger for years. Let me start charging you a toilet plunger subscription just for privilege of using it when you please. That's your logic.
This is interesting. I'm just curious to know how long will it survive until Apple adds something like that to their software. Do you have a fallback plan for this? But I must say that the idea is quite interesting.
Apple already does that since last year at least. In many situations if you 4x and put your finger on the 1x you’ll see the picture change. Sometimes massively
Honestly, I assumed the stock phone apps are doing this by default. It would be stupid not to? It's like a low-hanging fruit present ever since phones started having multiple cameras on the back.
(EDIT: though the only real confirmation of this being done that I have is, Samsung's "Camera Assistant" addon has an option to enable "2x zoom" as separate button, and the description there states explicitly it's a synthetic zoom made from combining the main and telephoto camera.)
(EDIT2: come to think of it, for almost any regular mode, if I use my fingers to block two of the three cameras, the image is unchanged, which empirically proves at least Samsung is not doing this - which again makes me wonder, why not? It's an obvious thing to do.)
On that note, I don't understand why there's no widespread, genai-free apps for "super resolution" aka. take a video (or a burst photo shot) of a stationary thing and use it to reconstruct a single photo with much higher detail level.
For videos I can imagine the reason would be that video compression is literally doing the inverse of that (i.e. the information you'd need to reconstruct a higher-resolution image is exactly the one that the compressor throws away for 90% of the frames), so the algorithm and compressor would cancel out. But that doesn't explain why this doesn't seem to exist for burst photos.
I'm confused. So this is just producing a single photo that is clearer in a middle rectangle and blurrier outside that rectangle?
Of course the extra detail in the middle is nicer, but won't the edge of the "detail rectangle" be extremely obvious and distracting? Like when you zoom into satellite view on Maps and it's clear that there's a blurry area and a sharp area?
I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image. I can understand why you'd want to snap photos with both lenses simultaneously as save them as separate photos, but I don't understand why you'd combine them.
> I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image.
An image with the FOV of the wide-angle camera but the quality of the main one in the center? Assuming the border interpolation works well (which tbf is probably hard for close objects), why would anyone not want this?
I am co fused, 50% of photos look better in standard zoom and 50% of them look better woth photosynthesis. This is like an anti campaign for the app hinting "in the end it doesn't really matter"
I think this may be due to an issue I've had with loading the full res zoom images on the website, I've been going back and forth trying to balance the loading times and stress on the browser with clarity of the images. Working on a new idea now, so hopefully it'll give better demonstrations soon.
How can you in good conscience charge a subscription for this? It would be one thing if the app relied on infrastructure, but it's a one and done algorithm that's entirely local on device!
Subscriptions are charged because the developer needs to maintain the upkeep and cost of running the service, but that's not applicable here. It's capable of taking a million photographs fully offline, without any reliance on an online service.
Essentially you're saying your product is so superb that people should pay you indefinitely for the privilege of using it. Even though it costs you nothing to maintain, you somehow need people to perpetually pay you for a local, offline algorithm that you wrote one time. How gross, that's the definition of pointless greed.
Shame on you, honestly. This is exactly what's wrong with modern software nowadays. Just like Adobe and all these other companies, taking advantage of people to milk them dry forever. You'll lease a product, you won't have the right to own anything, and you'll be happy about it.
>It would be one thing if the app relied on infrastructure
Look into value based pricing. It's a mistake to charge based on how much something costs you to produce.
As an example, if I make an SEO tweak that makes a company an extra $10M in profit a year, should I charge for the hour of effort it took? Or should I charge differently?
Very cool stuff, I've long thought there must be some fancy ways to get extra information for better image resolution by taking advantage of the other cameras.
That said, I must also say that most of the side-by-side comparison photos shown here are somewhat impressive, and in some cases, the photosynthesis one just looks worse to my untrained eye.
_______________
I'll choose to take this as evidence of the fact that you're tacking a very difficult problem, and you're also being honest in your comparisons and not cherry-picking too aggressively.
As dole alluded to below, I have been going back and forth in balancing the quality of the example pictures with the data load. I've pushed an update to the site now that weighs much more towards quality for this exact reason! But you're right, I don't want to hide the fact that not all results are perfect.
I think this is actually how oneplus phones have taken 'night' mode photos for a very long time in their default camera app, it takes multiple exposures and uses the movement sensor in the phone to pick several which were taken with the least hand jitter, and then stacks them into the final result.
Parallax error decreases significantly when lens are close enough and these are mm apart. They are close enough that you can probably just play a perspective trick and hide any artifacts.
I want to know what is possible if there were triple the number of cameras on the back of the phone and every single one fired on every photo. If they all focused at different points, the telephotos zoomed at different lengths etc., maybe throw some infrared cameras on there as well, what would be the results when combined?
There is a much better way of doing this which some professional cameras do called pixel shift. It shifts the sensor a tiny amount in between multiple exposures to compose in to an absurdly high resolution image. The downside is it only works on a tripod since you need the camera perfectly still.
The obvious issue with multiple cameras at different focal lengths is they won't all cover the frame of the widest one so only parts of the image will be sharper.
But if this matters to you, just get a full frame camera. Any 33MP full frame will blow away a 200MP phone camera in sharpness and detail.
I wasn't thinking so much about resolution, but rather all the other things it might allow. Re-focusing after taking it, for example. 3D by default, since the width of a phone is basically the distance between your eyes. A host of other things the much-more-high-powered CPU on the phone can do compared to a camera.
For refocusing, you can achieve this with focus bracketing, the camera takes the same photo at different focus points in quick succession. The reason phone default camera apps don't have this as a feature is because their depth of field is so massive that pretty much everything is in focus all the time anyway. But it's a feature on dedicated cameras.
>3D by default
This actually is an option in the ios camera app if you switch to spacial mode. Though I think the only use case is they look slightly nicer on the Apple vision pro. And also the iphone can just fake 3D on any photo with AI.
If there was a compelling reason to cover the phone in more cameras and sell it as a feature, Samsung would have done it by now.
The Apple spatial photos are enabled by the depth camera, right? Which is kind of my point - more cameras mean more features!
> If there was a compelling reason to cover the phone in more cameras and sell it as a feature, Samsung would have done it by now.
I dunno, they generally tend to be a follower, not a leader. Even their new foldable is generally accepted as a tactical manoeuver ahead of Apple's foldable.
This might be a personal preference thing, but in every single example photo on that page, I significantly prefer the colours in the "standard zoom" version of the photo. I wonder if they can figure out how to do this fusion without losing that beautiful contrast the zoom lens brings to the table?
That's really interesting - the colour match attempts to find the best match between the two lens outputs, which frequently results in them 'meeting in the middle'. You can then manually adjust the output of each lens within the app's editing interface. I'll have a think about the weighting of the colour match.
This was actually a purported feature of the Pixel 3 camera. Google said it would be constantly taking photos and the different information captured as your hand moved slightly could be used to create higher information density photos. It didn't work very well at that point but the idea was cool!
I believe that's a similar idea to Apple's Deep Fusion which also takes multiple frames from the same lens then intelligently combines them for higher detail. As ipsum2 said below, that's different to Photosynthesis, which captures from different lenses simultaneously.
very cool app, a few questions: why does the color "temp" of the image change between traditional iphone photography vs your app? it appears to both warm and cool the images. Also why is the contrast decreased, specifically in the library/book store example?
I like the idea of this app and the website is well done. Subscription isn't for me, but for folks who take a lot of photos and need this sort of thing, I can see it. Free tier could offer a few more photos per month.
I tried this using TestFlight but I get the distinct feeling that this is (1) vibe coded (and as a consequence, a fair bit of AI slop, you can even tell from the UI) (2) Slow and bloated from the get go - just look at the download size, nearly 170MB (3) Also the results are disappoint to say the least.
So maybe other people find more value in this, but it's off my TestFlight for now.
All 3 is in the app! It's a much harder challenge to deal with the parallax and other artefacts that come up from combining 3 lenses, so that particular feature is launching in beta.
My hesitations on this are it stores data in a proprietary format that I may not be able to export to another common format if the product disappears in a few years.
For something personal like photos and the memories they capture, that's not ideal for me.
While the app is still with us, I'm not sure how much it will cost me to export to my photos to my photo library each month.
There is zero lock-in with the files being saved - you can export from the app in HEIC/PNG/JPEG as well as PSD and spatial/SBS 3D. The format the website calls the 'Photosynthesis' file is an HEIC so even if you export that you can still access the data outside of the app.
Unlimited exports of the composite images are part of the subscription (with an option to automatically export to Photos.app and/or a folder of your choosing), but the free tier still offers unlimited saving of the constituent images e.g. the wide & tele shots, just not the composite.
This appears to use a naïve masking approach (using ML to find the edges of the mask) which seems to suffer from slight uncorrected differences in lens distortion. There's a fairly obvious feathering around the edges of the detailed area, objects shift quite dramatically, and overall I feel like I'd do a better job of this manually. It is a cool idea, but flawed execution. I would prefer something like using ML to generate a displacement map between the wide angle and the narrow angle parts. That way you can map the higher details down faithfully without having to feather the edges nearly as much or compute any mask. That would also solve parallax which I see also looks unaccounted for.
This whole thing feels wrong. OP should be working for a phone manufacturer, not trying to sell this as a subscription. How much is it worth to be able to squeeze a little more visual clarity out of my phone? Maybe $20 maximum? And I feel like I’m on the generous side of the population here. Most people will say $0. But if you’re inside of Apple and you can tell them you can add an average of $1 of perceived value to each of their millions of phones sold each year they’ll be over the moon and you can get a fat salary.
Some older android phones like the Huawei P20 Pro had a combination of 40 MP main sensor and 8 MP monochrome sensor and combined them to produce a better image. But modern phones tend to have zoom, normal and wide-angle lenses which don't overlap in any meaningful sense.
Your idea about combining two lenses to make a better quality image could also be done with a single lens, just taking more photos in a row. Almost all phones (iOS/Android) do this for you already.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple isn't already doing this and just doesn't say so explicitly. There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone photo. Would be interesting to compare a photo taken with the native camera app and photosynthesis to compare. I'm assuming your demo images on your site are the raw and processed images from your app that don't go through Apple's "secret sauce" processing pipeline.
Hijacking this comment because of this line that reminded me of something:
"There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone"
I bought the Pixel 10 because it said it had great zooming capabilities. After 5X (that means 10X), it's completely stupid. Basically it takes a very blurred photo and then tries to reconstruct it with AI. The final results are completely awful and really distant from reality.
Any advice in how to improve that?
You can use third party camera apps - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/ is a decent one. I know there's a few professional ish options too with dslr ish focus control.
One solution is to buy a more expensive Pro version that has optical 5x zoom (or, rather, a third camera that start at 5x).
In photos after you can toggle between the AI modified and original. The original isn't as blurry as the preview shown - there's still a lot of image stacking happening and it's often very decent in my experience.
Edited to add: I have a pixel 10 pro which has a better zoom lens, so I could be having a different experience than you...
Also have a 10 pro .. but the AI-enhanced zoom goes up to 100x and is actually pretty handy for working out what tiny things in the distance actually are ... even if it's only a representation of that thing. Often use it for identifying birds, boats, etc.
I think my p10p's 100x zoom is neat, but I'd strongly caution against using it for ID in any sense, or necessarily even treating it as a photograph. It will "straight up hallucinate" objects into existence, more of a creative interpretation of 100x digital zoom than an oracle into the identity of something far off.
Makes for a fine image if "looking good" is the objective (which it often is), but I wouldn't trust it to disambiguate anything uncertain.
> Basically it takes a very blurred photo and then tries to reconstruct it with AI
So the ENHANCE is no longer just some lazy movie writing!
Even funnier:
The biggest of the "sharpening with AI" models, if you let 'em go, they'll turn you into a celebrity on accident.
If you go to the Topaz AI forums on Facebook, you'll see examples of where the AI sharpening tool went off the rails and turned a blurry photo of someone (typically the user who bought the software, who is trying to clean up their own photos) into whichever celebrity that is in the AI model who resembles them.
IE, it might turn a photo of YOU into a photo of Robert Downey Jr.
A couple years ago, we needed a good photo of my grandfather for a photo collage. The best photo I had of him was where he's sitting next to a very decrepit looking old woman (some family friend?). It really was a great composition, great lighting, background and pose but the old lady was killing the vibe. My wife is really skilled at Photoshop but removing this old lady would have been really difficult so we decided to try the generative fill, something she had never used before. She selected the lady and typed in "delete this person". Instead of deleting her, it creates this strange, human like being. We try again and again with different permutations of the same command. Most of the attempts just replace the old lady with a small asian child. Eventually we just try with a blank prompt and it gets it in the first go. The Asian child thing was really strange, it truly looked like the same kid but just slightly different appearance each time.
> it truly looked like the same kid but just slightly different appearance each time
Jory Miller?
That's hilarious!
Also wonder how how long until photos are no longer court-admissible evidence because they get overwhelmed with the burden of the amount (and the cost) of the "non-AI" certification?
I can see film and instant cameras making a comeback for anything that needs to be used as evidence.
We've been living in the age of photoshopped photos for decades now. You can't just present a random photo as evidence without being able to back up its provenance.
As long as you know how to edit metadata, you can definitely fool minor “trust systems” like adjusters, police, etc. It’s a big gap. (For any future readers, no I have not done this and would never do it, really.)
The only solution I see is some kind of hardware-linked signature showing that the image was produced at a certain time, by a certain device. In theory, you could make this signature somewhat “provable” and anchored to a specific time by combining something like 1) the latest Bitcoin block hash, and 2) a blockchain anchor, thereby proving that the photo was taken within a certain time widow after the hash was known and before the anchor was published. But even that arrangement is highly susceptible to hardware attacks.
I'd like to be able to use my hardware security key for this purpose (the hardware-linked signature)
The ENHANCE meme used to drive me nuts because it is clearly impossible. My brother and I even briefly competed to find the earliest ENHANCE reference (I no longer remember what we concluded, but it goes surprisingly far back). The fact that it actually exists now is mind-boggling (even though it is, by necessity, still a fiction).
Can't wait for the first use of such images as evidence in court.
No, 10X is fine - there is enough resolution on the sensor to just crop the 5x images to 10x without any weirdness.
After 10x it's all over. Which is in itself quite insane. The camera is truly amazing, and complaining that this 10mm thick camera is no good at further than 10x seems utterly spoiled and ridiculous to me.
Wasn't that the same manufacturer that got caught with the moon AI stuff? Lol
The was Samsung, iirc: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
Gotcha, thanks! Funny that they didn't learn from that one
That was samsung
go closer irl
Yes exactly, the site shows photos all taken from within the app. I have done A/B tests against photos taken in Camera.app and the Photosynthesis composite does significantly beat the detail central area covered by the second lens in Photosynthesis.
Because of the limitations of capturing multiple lenses at once through isVirtualDeviceConstituentPhotoDeliveryEnabled, there is a second capture mode in the app for 'Quality' which takes a simultaneous capture then takes sequential shots from each lens which do benefit from Deep Fusion, then uses those for the stitch (as long as the Deep Fusion images outperform the simultaneous capture results). That's also what I do for our Night mode.
Phones have been doing this for a LONG time, if you had a oneplus 7 pro (released may 2019) and took it into an extremely dark area, like where your eyes can't see anything at all, and take a 'night mode' photo, it asks you to hold it steady for about 4-5 seconds and is clearly taking a series of photos with long exposure time. Then it stacks them and uses data from the sensor of hand movement jitter to deblur.
The result when done outdoors (like, standing in a dark forest at midnight) will be a photo where you can actually see what's around you, and details show up as if it was a brightly full moon lit night.
That's a bunch of photos from the same camera, not 2 lenses at the same time
I know, I just don't think it's a huge jump from "take multiple photos over a 2s period from one camera and stack them" to "take several photos from discrete physical cameras and stack them". As a subscription of paid app I am not the target market for the person who made this, I agree with another person commenting in here that said they should be working for a phone manufacturer.
I’d argue the opposite. The geometry involved in reconciling photos from two separate lenses with different focal lengths is quite challenging. If you pay close attention you will see some differences in the before/after samples in the site (for example the ear in that kitchen selfie).
The math is surely more complex than aligning same-lens photography even when you consider the change in angle and perspective between two shots from the same lens.
Not really. Whether you have two different lenses or the same lenses with some offset from hand movement you need to accurately model the lens(es). Once you can do that for one lens you can just as easily do it for two - it's just more variables to optimize, not a fundamentally harder problem. Panorama software has supported images from different lenses since forever.
The Amazon Fire Phone did this in 2014. I'm not aware of any prior art in mainstream devices aside from gimmicks like 3D (stereoscopic) photos. I can't remember if the Fire Phone had any relevant gimmicks but it certainly used multiple lenses to produce a single image.
UAV sensor people made a thing that uses 300+ phone size sensors in a single pod, and software workflow to fuse the output together. It's been around quite a few years now.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ARGUS+pho...
Ah yes, how could I forget the ARGUS-IS, a household staple of the early 21st century. Those were the days...
I keep an extra one next to my panini press, the image quality from the whiteboard notes area on my fridge has never been sharper!
I think it's interesting that the same functionality appeared on iPhone in 2019 as well. Google tells me it was the iPhone 11 and iOS 13.
Night Sight appeared on the Google Pixel camera app in 2018. I think Nokia was doing it first on phones before Microsoft destroyed the remains of their phone business.
The reborn Nokia/HMD was also doing multi-sensor image stacking back in 2019 on the Nokia 9 Pureview.
The related paper (2019): https://google.github.io/night-sight/
Google has some great blogs about their camera technology https://research.google/blog/night-sight-seeing-in-the-dark-...
There is an iOS app that does this called Spectre: https://spectre.cam
From the authors of Halide.
It's different from just stacking exposures, it's a paid app that does progressive animation of exposures for creative effect and says it's "AI-powered" whatever that means.
It's a paid app that I literally have, and all it does is take multiple photos and composite them together. It can either naïvely average them together in-place like a traditional long exposure, or align them using machine learning. I'm actually appalled they use the term "AI" considering who they are but that doesn't matter, it's ML. I don't use any of the animation crap, but the aligned long exposures can be useful for ultrawide takes since that camera is so noisy.
Edit: actually I can't seem to find the setting that aligns them. I seem to remember it being able to do that but maybe it doesn't... which would be disappointing...
I have it too but after like 3 times I never used it again, felt like a cheap gimmick. I regret falling for hype. If anything they do good marketing
> I'm actually appalled they use the term "AI" considering who they are but that doesn't matter, it's ML.
I agree, and I built it!
The app launched in 2019. Ideally I would have said ML, but it felt like AI had more recognition among non-technical users.
If I launched it in 2026, it would 100% say "ML" not only because it's more technically accurate, but to make it abundantly clear it doesn't generate slop.
People are slapping "AI" on anything these days to try to sell more units of whatever it is.
I use iPhones (paid for by work) as a tool for my agronomy job. I take a large amount of photos throughout the day to help document what I find in the field.
Since at least the iPhone 12, holding the phone still and letting scene sit for a few seconds will result in a sharper photo. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle version focus stacking or a sharpening algorithm, but it’s definitely there.
On my 16e, immediately looking at a photo just taken can result in the image noticeably sharpening after a second or 2, so this may be a post processing step as well.
It's probably a version of this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3306346.3323024
Subtle movement between shots can be used to create an image sharper than any of the inputs.
From what I can tell, it's taking multiple photos and stacking them in post. So giving the phone more time to capture sharp exposures to stack would do a lot to help.
Reading title and this ^ comment before loading the page made my brain assume that this is about combining front and rear image sensors, and additionally using eye/facial tracking to infer user intention + satisfaction to help with stabilization/framing/post-processing. I'm glad(?) we aren't there yet.
I think this is just Deep Fusion.
One time I took a photo of a snake in the road with my iphone in low light. When I looked at the photo afterwards the snake was removed by the AI enhancement
Similar story but my low-light snake photo turned out much less “scary” than in real life.
I’m guessing it has to do with how intensely focused / scared my brain was with the little guy
But they do do this? They talk about it? It's not a secret
It is part of Apple’s “secret sauce”, yes.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions, lol
Don't they do this with the "macro" setting already ?
This should be easy to check. In these photos, the center of the image has higher detail than the edges.
Maybe on this guy’s app, but not the way Apple does it.
If that's the case then it would disprove the original assertion that Apple already does the same thing. You can't have the same high detail at the edges without making shit up because those parts of the image are out of frame for the higher zoom lens.
Somewhat related... I made an indie app called TwinCam which combines front-and-back camera images to create a combined selfie. Free. No strings attached. Cheers!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/twincam/id6448645623 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.evergreenl...
> No strings attached.
Except for the "have full network access" permission according to the Google Play Store.
This is probably some kind of configuration mistake… I wouldn’t presume the author has any nefarious intent.
Probably the default in whatever framework they used.
There are very few apps on app stores that don't need network these days. Feel free to check out the details on the settings page on the app.
Which is why a responsible person avoids the official app stores whenever possible. F-Droid FTW.
I have a Motorola moto g stylus 2025. I have not altered the OS or installed a custom rom. I simply have not signed into Google yet. I use aurora store to download and install app updates from the play store. What I'm curious about is why some apps won't even open at all without a Google log in? Is there something in your app that requires a Google account?
This is unusual. It does have libraries from MLKit for selfie segmentation. So, maybe missing access to Play Services.
Neat work, but the free tier lets you export 3 images a month and the alternative is a subscription? No thanks.
Thank you! I'm quite a new dev so honestly I don't know where to pitch the free tier, and I'm not above changing it. Do you have any suggestions for the free tier?
Charge some number of dollars once. There's no service here, so why would we need a subscription?
Maintaining an app isn't free. You let it sit stale for a year or 2 and you'll get kicked from the App Store for non-compliance.
Not to mention the developer account subscription is $99/year
This is hardly convincing. A $99/yr fee and a once every 2 years update doesn't warrant a monthly subscription fee from every user. Eg a $9.99 app could cover those costs with a few dozen downloads
Might be. But as an Indie developer and maintaining app is just not the app developer and maintenance. Upgrades and the development requirements around it are costly and needs constant upgrades! I'm not justifying, but trying my best to bring the reality. The time spent on development, hardware costs, licensing costs, design costs etc, are to be factored.
If people are working on a full-time job and trying to create something in the free (!!) time (it still needs to be valued for the time and effort!) and they could chose to or not to charge for the app. It's more personal and a general view.
IMHO, any and all subscription fees are justified based on the thoughts of the developer and how he values his effort, time and development complexity.
Not stating anything about it even if it is not appealing or convincing. It is purely a personal choice and the dynamics of value, usage, benefits, cost and the problem it solves from the buyer's side will also kick into the thought process and decision making.
I'm just saying only one side of the story and want to record my thoughts. Peace out!
I’ve been at it over a decade now and still found the only reliable way to make money from offline App Store apps is good old fashioned paid apps, $2.99 being a nice sweet-spot.
If you had customers buying last year, it’s likely you’ll have even more customers buying next year. If you stop maintaining your app, that stream of new sales almost immediately dries up.
Offline mobile apps which charge a subscription are a very silly fad to me. The few that get away with it are being steadily edged out by someone else who wants to eat their lunch.
I love the OP’s idea and absolutely see the use case. I also think it’s very promptable. My unsolicited advice is to strike while the iron’s hot at $0.99, because I’d be very skeptical if they’ll attract enough subscribers before getting starved out by copycats.
Why can't we be just... done? Why is software development a never ending treadmill? App does what it's supposed to, the developer earns something (or doesn't), and they can I dunno, abandon it if it wasn't successful enough and the API breaks, without any guilt? Do something else with their life?
OK? That's just the reality of business. You launch something and then need to do marketing to keep getting it in front of people until word spreads around that your app is a must-have thing for whatever it does and you get a decent number of sales every month.
In general, when I buy something I want to pay for it once and then have it. I don't want to rent or lease it, even if it's consumable. When I eat a restaurant I I pay for the meal when it's over; if it was delicious I might come back again. Even if I like it so much that I eat there every week, that doesn't mean I want a weekly subscription.
A restaurant can do just fine by making you a good meal every week, knowing you'll come back and pay them for each meal.
An engineer with an app can come to work 365 days a year, fix bugs, add nice new features, unbreak the app every time iOS updates, and, though you use the app every day, they can't count on you to give them another $5 every year - or ever again - unless you enter into a subscription.
This isn't to say you have some obligation to do a subscription to any app you don't think is worth it, but for apps from non-scam developers, they're usually like $20 or less a year - about a nickel a day. A nickel is 3¢ in year-2000 dollars btw.
It's on the developer to prove to you that the app is worth paying a nickel a day to have! But ruling it out just because we wish it didn't have to be, well, that just rewards the developers who monetize exclusively with ads or sell their 'free' apps to sketchy operators.
I'd like it if Uber was free or just cost a buck a ride flat rate, but I know that anyone willing to give me a ride on terms like that is probably looking to rob me.
Who expects 'nice new features' from an app they already decided to buy? Keeping the app compatible with new OS releases is necessary to keep sales going.
After a year, I don't think anyone is bothered if an app becomes unsupported for whatever reason. Usually what happens is the opposite - developer unnecessarily cripples an existing, perfectly working app, to try to milk some more revenue out of it.
This is an especially moot point now that most platform API upgrades are $1 of LLM work away.
> Who expects 'nice new features' from an app they already decided to buy?
I was just listing one more thing a developer who wasn't slacking might spend his time doing, that's all.
> Keeping the app compatible with new OS releases is necessary to keep sales going.
Relying on constant sales to new users sounds like a pyramid scheme. Software licenses don't wear out like shoes or become consumed like butter, with happy customers returning to buy more. Eventually, most of the people that need most apps have bought it and sales don't "keep going" more than a trickle, except for apps that are such mainstream hits that your new users are just "everyone who became old enough this month to get their first phone." And because the App Store has ruined organic discovery, paid apps rely almost exclusively on paying for installs either via Apple's ads or elsewhere. So, that eats a good part of each new sale's revenue right away.
Check the iOS top charts right now. For paid apps, the top-selling app is Shadowrocket, a rule-based proxy utility. How long until all developers who want a rule-based proxy utility have already paid the $3? If 100,000 developers buy that app, then that developer nets $210,000 pre-income-tax. About on par with a good corporate SWE job outside of FAANG. But that will slow down. There just aren't that many people who are looking for that. #2 is just a client of a subscription service for businesses. #3 is AnkiMobile Flashcards at $25. See, at that price I agree it can afford to never charge again. #4 is an ephemeral app for some art event in Portland so it doesn't need to be sustained. #5 is Procreate Pocket. I guess there are enough new aspiring artists appearing every day who can afford these apps (I think it's $13 for iPad).
> After a year, I don't think anyone is bothered if an app becomes unsupported for whatever reason.
Okay, so subscribe to the apps you use, and then immediately go in and turn off renewal in Settings -> (your Apple ID) -> Subscriptions. There. You now have a one-time purchase of an app which will stop working in a year - just like apps that have no recurring revenue stream do.
> This is an especially moot point now that most platform API upgrades are $1 of LLM work away.
I don't think you are a developer of serious iOS apps. Just the visual changes, that users expect apps to go along with, require major redesigns. People don't buy apps that look like they were designed in 2019.
A restaurant has to cook a whole new meal for every customer. An app developer does not.
We seem to be arguing at cross purposes. I am not saying that software is not worth paying for. $20 seems a very reasonable price for an application if it meets a customer's needs, and the only expectation I have beyond that is that it continues to work across OS updates. I'm OK with big version upgrades being a separate sale.
It's not the amount of the payment. It's the subscription model I can't stand. You're correct that I might use an app I like every day. But the marginal cost to the developer of me using it every day is $0. Rather than belabor the restaurant example , consider a book or a music CD. Writing books or recording music is generally a slow and difficult process, it takes months to produce one that might be read in a weekend. But if you buy a book, you can read or refer to it every day without paying again, or you cna listen to your favorite songs as often as you like by playing the CD. Nowadays many people prefer to stream music, but I think when people buy a book (even an e-book), they consider that it's their copy to read as often as they want...
...or not. If I buy a book and I don't like it, or later I find another book that I turn out to prefer to the first one, I can just not read it again. I don't have to cancel a subscription for the book.
This is where I get to with a lot of non-crazy people (the crazy ones just won't pay for software). Since you are fine paying $20 for a useful app, a $7 a year subscription can be better than a $20 one-time purchase in meaningful ways.
It aligns your incentives with the developer very well. They really want you to not cancel your subscription after only paying the first year's payment (when you may not have even paid back the customer acquisition cost!), and you want the app to be high quality and well-maintained. If the developer doesn't meet your bar for that, you cancel the subscription with 4 taps and they lose future income. That incentive to please customers after the sale just doesn't exist in a pay-once app world (except in tiny niches of old-school developers, like the Panics of the world, whom I do greatly respect).
Besides the incentives, it also gives you a chance to, after that one-year $7 spend, re-evaluate "do I even use this anymore?" If you paid for a guitar tuning app and you stopped playing guitar, you can just cancel the subscription, even before you've paid the amount that they'd have priced it for one-time-purchase. There is upside for the consumer in the apps that either let you down, or that you simply realized you no longer need, and it lowers the risk bar to try an app that you aren't sure about.
I get that if you do end up using such an app for the next 15 years, yes you'll probably pay somewhat more than any price you'd have considered paying one-off, but it also probably means that app (an app you use often for decades) couldn't have been sustained for all that time with only new customer installs paying the bills.
> if you buy a book, you can read or refer to it every day without paying again, or you cna listen to your favorite songs as often as you like by playing the CD.
We agree that this is all very great. And since the music or book you buy carries zero support burden of any kind from the artist it's a pretty great model - after their album launches the artist can devote 100% of their bandwidth to producing new music, or they can tour to get recurring income out of the same music, or a mix of the two.
You're using a device with an ever-evolving OS that constantly breaks compatibility.
If you paid for it once and only got to keep the version of it as of when you paid for it, in a couple years the platform would remove your ability to use it.
Does Apple not let you charge an upgrade fee?
Don't want new features, and don't need an upgrade then stick with it. If you need the new version, then pay a partial amount of the app for the upgrade?
That's their problem, not yours.
Even when you paid for software in the Good Old Days it was guaranteed to be compatible with ONE version of your OS, e.g. Windows 95. When you upgraded Windows, you'd often need to buy a new edition.
Even that's not really true. Most software that ran on Windows 95 could be run without modification or even a single update on both Windows 98 and Windows ME. Even XP preserved compatibility for most programs, adding explicit compatibility modes you could enable for an application that wouldn't work out of the box.
So, in the old days, you paid often $50-500 for a piece of software and the developer would usually have zero burden to update the software for you. By the time the OS completely broke it, it would have been 5+ years later. All that time, the developer was freed up to build and sell whole other applications, or, to innovate new and compelling features to get you to pay the upgrade price to get a new version.
Today that developer would have to do 5 major updates with breaking API changes, and probably at least 1 full visual refresh just to keep up with Apple's changing design whims, just for that one app to not be bricked. They have less bandwidth then to build more apps, since each app carries its own annual burden of churn.
If charging for a subscription causes the business to fail it’s their problem. Alternatively it could be what allows them to make a living.
demonstrably incorrect, it is very easy to find apps with "last updated" dates 2+ years ago. Paid example:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-dark-room/id736683061
users don't need the app to be maintained, just installed once.
Yes they do need it to be maintained because they update their phone and any apps that don't keep up can no longer be used unless the dev does more work.
I’ll buy the new version then
What’s their LLM sub cost? That’s the ongoing cost plus App Store fee. Some expensive sub to save photos is just dumb.
In 1995 or even 2001, this was a completely reasonable line. Most software was written for Windows, and Microsoft clearly considered it taboo to break old software, whether their own or third-party. You could install Office 95 on Windows XP if you really wanted to, which didn't seem unreasonable, as you spent $300+ on the suite.
Giving this advice to developers today is frankly absurd career advice.
1. Few apps can achieve the scale needed for a one-time fee to be sustaining for the app - most apps appeal to a finite set of people, and eventually most who are in your target market (and who are willing to spend actual upfront money), have bought the app.
2. An entire generation has grown up that has never paid more than maybe 99 cents for software, and most refuse to even pay that - they're used to adware. You can't price an "app" at $75 and expect it to be bought by essentially anyone. While adware can actually be a very financially viable route, many developers hate ads and want nothing to do with this model.
3. Unlike the multiple years of stability of old desktop operating systems, platform owners today think nothing of breaking even a plurality of apps with any major OS version - and for some insane reason they also think a new "major version" ought to come out annually.
If you want apps that cease getting updates after a few months and age very poorly, or just to have no choices out there besides adware, keep boycotting every developer who uses a subscription, regardless of how cheap it is.
If you want apps that are diligently maintained and which keep working forever, reward developers who produce apps with reasonable subscriptions. I have a password manager that's $19 a year and covers my whole family, and a podcast player that's $15. That password manager comes out to a nickel a day.
So if you have thirty apps installed that comes to $600 a year in subscriptions or $50 a month.
I pay exactly zero a month in subscriptions.
What a silly strawman though.
I wouldn't have enough time in the day (or month) to use 30 apps, or even 10, once you subtract all the first-party ones and ones that are just interfaces for things that are monetized separately (grocery store app, restaurant app, Uber, etc).
I have 3 paid subscription apps.[1] Total cost $43 a year. My only point was that if there's an app that is useful why shouldn't you pay a small amount per year that sustains it, guaranteeing that it gets good attention from a developer who is accountable not to their advertisers, but their users.
[1] Note: That doesn't count streaming services, but my family paid for cable 30 years ago and that was fine. It's entertainment.
I shouldn’t pay because I’ve already paid. Price updates for the same major version in. Let new sales be your incentive to keep it up-to-date. Let a new version I actually want be my incentive to spend more money.
Subscriptions for software that don’t offer an external service put all the incentives backwards strictly to the benefit of the developer and expense of the user.
There’s no question why it’s a great deal for the developer. But nothing you’ve said explains why any user should buy into this at all.
I'm not principally opposed to subscriptions, but subscribing to a camera app is absurd.
Your post prompted me to donate to KeepassXC, my subscriptionsless password manager, because I would be sad if that went away, and I would hate if the software landscape became even more a subscription hell than it already is.
Pedants corner:
>most apps appeal to a finite set of people
The set of people is finite.
I think the less frowned upon way to charge is to just do it once.
If the Apple store supports this, free trial + one time payment sounds like a good way. Don't optimize for freeloaders, as someone else said.
If the app relies only on iPhone hardware and/or is not a live service, an account/subscription should not be required. Even non-devs might justifiably ask "why do I need a subscription for a camera app".
Halide asks for a subscription. Not entirely sure why yet. Yes, it is more advanced than the normal app. Also slower and I haven’t noticed any changes or improvements in the last two years. Maybe support for new features in newer iPhones.
In May, we launched Mark III, which was a huge rewrite and leap forward in features.
https://www.lux.camera/halide-mark-iii/
As for the subscription, there’s always been a pay-once option for major releases. You just miss out on a free trial, the beta program, and anything we might release with ongoing costs.
Halide's subscription system seems to have broken since late 2024/early 2025 — my v1 purchase with a different Apple ID from the one I'm usually logged in with (different country/region) wasn't being recognised.
When I emailed in, they blamed it on how the App Store mechanism changed.
Halide somehow is the only app that has this issue.
We switched to Apple's StoreKit 2 framework, which uses different internal plumbing. Not only is it the recommended way moving forward from Apple, but it improves the user experience for purchase management.
The issue is that, indeed, it actually validates that the App Store account currently logged in purchased the app. I believe this is intended behavior, as it closes a piracy loophole where you could log into the Apple ID of a friend, download all their paid apps, and then log in to a different account while retaining access.
If other apps don't run into this problem, it's possible they haven't moved on to StoreKit 2. Or the app has their own login independent of app subscription; setting aside the time it would take me to build that, I don't think most people are willing to create an account to try a camera app.
They offer both a subscription model and a lifetime purchase. Or that used to be the case, at least. But I agree that it feels like it's getting behind.
They just released a major update, but it's not something I would pay a subscription for. I paid the lifetime fee in it's early days, but that doesn't unlock the new updates sadly.
I use Analogue for day to day capture, and NoFusion and Moment apps for things I will want to edit later. All with one-time purchase. I don't mind paying for quality apps, but I do have subscription fatigue now.
There is still a lifetime purchase for the new version, IIRC. I can see it in the App Store IAP section. (Which is so useful! Lets me filter for apps that have a lifetime option at all.)
Did not know that!
Might check it out. Thanks for letting me know. But really been enjoying Analogue lately.
Also, I just checked, I purchased Mark II lifetime and got Mark III for free. It's only Mark I users that didn't get it.
Unfortunately it looks like lifetime users don't get access to the beta program for whatever reason. I guess they don't want feedback from those users.
I tried Analogue too, but I stopped using third-party camera apps altogether because they all seem to suffer from an issue where if you lock the phone too quickly after taking a photo, the photo is lost forever. I lost so many photos to this that I knew I took.
Apple limits TestFlight to 10,000 testers. Folks who are paying a recurring fee expect to see more frequent updates, so they get priority.
Halide shouldn't be afflicted by the lost photo issue you're talking about. Normally, if you close a lock-screen extension before a photo is written, it won't be in your library. This can be a problem when the user quickly smashes the capture button and your photo queue gets backed up.
Luckily, the unlocked app gets a chance later to access the content of lock-screen capture sessions. So our strategy in Halide is to write the intermediate files to disk as soon as you initiate a capture; this should take a split second. When we have uninterruptible time, later, we make sure the photo finished writing to your library, and if not, we try again.
However, Apple's documentation isn't clear if the OS will "wake-up" your main app to process unfinished photos, or if it relies on the user launching the app. I'll just say that I dog-food Halide every day by capturing photos of my toddler, and I can't remember the last time I lost a shot.
At this point, I don't remember if I was using Halide from the lock screen or not, but I lost tons of photos because apparently I turned the screen off before the photo finished saving to the library. Halide forgot about it, and even after reopening the app, it was gone forever. This would only seem to happen when I turned the screen off quickly after taking the photo.
These days, I use the regular Camera app because I need my damn photos to save. I loved Halide, but that bug made it too unreliable. I get very distressed by data loss and couldn't continue to risk it while trying to develop a way to work around it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with charging, even if you vibe coded it. You clearly put a lot of effort into the design and concept.
As I said in more detail below, on a free tier I expect to be able to at least try it out in a normal way. a monthly limit of exporting 3 pictures (eg to look at on my computer or TV) seems like something a normal person would hit in the first 30 minutes of just exploring what it does. Now, I noticed you run it this way for 14 days, but I gotta say that on first view this was massively outweighed by the 3/month limit.
subscription-wise, I just don't like them. If you are doing a ton of server-side processing, I'd rather pay on an as-needed basis. If not, I'd rather just Pay $19.99 (or whatever price you determine to be competitive in the market for photo apps). I see why subscription income would be nice to have for you, but for me it's a financial leaky faucet. In that case, I'd prefer to just go without because the app is a fun thing to have rather than a professional need.
It also bothered me that it was described as a 'reasonably priced' subscription. If I don't see a $ sign and a number, I reflexively classify it as a scam even though rationally I know you're just testing the waters. I close or dismiss 10 or 20 things a day after a cursory glance into whether they're worth my time or money: fear of being ripped off (FOBRO) outweighs the fear of missing out (FOMO).
My suggestion is be generous and make a bit less money as the cost of making the world a kinder and more pleasant place. There's no rule that says you have to play ruthless capitalist.
We’re talking about an optional phone app.
and everyone is suggested milking it for every dollar. it's gross. this attitude is why so many things suck.
I would select products and services which are aligned with your values rather than moralizing.
I don't care what you suggest. If a person asks what they should do I'm gonna give them what I think is the most moral answer.
It’s immoral not to get a free phone photos app? Come on bro. You’re moralizing, not dealing with wrongdoing or mistreatment.
That's not what I said.
I said: note that you are not obligated to maximize profit and you can give away more features for free and that it generally makes the world a kinder place to do so.
The point being that they have a choice. Contrary to what people are saying they are supposed to do, charge as much as possible, they can still choose to do something else. This is of course the normal mindset everywhere else, but HN seems to forget about it.
I wouldn't worry - there are some customers you don't want (and that's fine). Apps require a fair bit of upkeep and I imagine a camera app will need testing/modifying to ensure it works with the camera in every annual phone release. If you want to capture people who don't want a subscription add a lifetime plan 2-3x the annual price. Almost nobody will buy it. People complain about subscriptions but back in the day the number of people that complained when an app with 99¢ and not free was also staggering.
So what you're saying is that you prompted Claude to produce the app for you and now you're charging for it? A bold move, but I wouldn't expect much returns before there's completely free apps doing the same thing
Don’t listen to him, people like that will always complain, yet will never upgrade or pay for your product. He does not have a problem with your price but the mere fact that you are trying to sell something. Devs are like that.
Just differentiate signal from noise. Listen to your target audience not random internet comments
I quite happily pay quite a lot for apps. The number I subscribe to is tiny
No way. Subscriptions make sense for services. This is just a regular app.
you can don’t listen to us and get 0 dollars from us or listen to us and get some dollars.
I think some dollars is better than 0 dollars.
Don’t overestimate the value of your products, it’s not an essential app. I’ll wait for someone else to vibecode it and release it for free.
Wrong. I would definitely pay for this and was interested in it precisely because I just bought n iPhone. I spend $500-1000/year on software.
But if there's a free tier I want to try out normal use patterns over the course of a week or a month, and I prefer one-time payments or token purchases to subscriptions. I do the latter only for my IDEs, and still don't like it that much.
My objection was to the free tier only allowing one to export 3 images a month. That seems bizarre to me, since in course of trying something for the first time you might make 5, 10, or 20 images in an hour. If I'm running into a monthly limit in the first few minutes of using a tool, my immediate reaction is that it's something I can live without.
Nothing in the app is gated from day 1, you get 14 days of unlimited use before the choice of free vs paid is even presented, with no need to sign up for an official "free trial", so you have a good amount of time to make your mind up.
I am also considering a lifetime unlock option.
Thank you, I think I've seen that from reviews for every paid app I've come across - still, happy to take feedback!
Nah man I’m not paying a subscription for a camera app that runs locally with zero need for cloud/servers/etc. beyond hosting their core product. I have paid as much as $50 for an app before (Artemis).
After I buy it I am zero burden to them beyond occasional updates, which I have very modest expectations of. They are far more likely to get my money if it’s one time. I can’t imagine paying a subscription for a physical camera, let alone a camera app on hardware I already paid a lot for
Make it permissive enough that 80% of potential users don't need to pay for subscription. 20% of a heck of a lot of people is still a lot.
do not do this please. if you have a good product, people will pay for it. if you don’t, you don’t. don’t optimize for free-loaders
If you have an enormous addressable market then it can pay to build awareness as quickly as possible. Having lots of enthusiastic users will do that. Having a useful free tier is a pretty uncontroversial way to get those users.
Plenty of apps do this - looking at the first browser tab I have open I see gmail which does exactly this.
For a pure client app like an iphone app, you don't have any real "per user" costs, so there are no concerns about going under from the costs of attempting this. It would be very different if you had to pay for server capacity.
correct. never optimize your product, just wait to see if it's a success or not.
Thank you - this has been my plan
I feel like the GP was being sarcastic.
It would have been nicer if the examples wouldn't have been digitally altered to exaggerate the results. For instance, the center of the third photo has been intentionally blurred in the "standard photo" version.
The fact that they have to resort to manipulation to sell their product tells me that they are not trustworthy and that their product is probably underwhelming.
All of the “normal zoom” versions looked better to me. Maybe the label was showing up on the wrong side of the slider.
Yes, in the wide shot of the band the left side looks significantly better to me, are the labels the wrong way round?
It’s weird, because the center of the image will be more detailed, so how are they dealing with the “grid of pixels” that is on the display. Are they doubling up the wide angle.
“Easy-to-understand framing The brackets over the viewfinder indicate the area covered by the more detailed lens. Frame your subject inside them to capture the best detail.“
Reminds me of the old 3d cameras that took two photos at once through 2 lenses (on film)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/206409326865?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%...
I'm scaling the wider 'outer' image using Core Graphics 'CGInterpolationQuality' to avoid blocky pixellation, then feathering the seam between the two lens outputs so the transition isn't jarring.
I didn't know about those Nishika stereo cameras, that looks incredible!
I just assumed this was what all phones with multiple rear cameras were doing, is it not? What are the multiple cameras for other than that?
Each camera has a different optical system with a different focal length range. This lets the camera cover everything from ultra wide angle to telescopic magnification while remaining thin enough to fit in a phone.
That's clearly not a problem, which the very app here demonstrates
Phones can't fit a zoom lens with moving elements. The other cameras are just other prime lenses so you aren't restricted to having a single focal length all the time.
When you hit the little 0.5x, 1x, 4x buttons in the camera app you are switching between the physical cameras. Though Apple goes out of their way to obscure what is actually happening.
The obvious issue with the product here is that the telephoto lens will not cover the whole image that the 1x captured so only some portion of the center of the frame will be higher resolution.
subscription camera app seems like peak comedy to me
Definitely not peak, my kid asked for a Rubik's Cube solver app which turned out to be subscription based, then wanted to tune her Ukelele with an app which turned out to be subscription based.
Gotta keep up with pitch inflation!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch
That's what makes me sad about the current Tetris game, on iOS.
One of my favorite games ever, and I'd gladly pay for an ad-free version, but they don't have it. I assume there's much more money to be made with ads, over subscriptions.
Play the Gameboy version. I bought every single official Tetris version and they all suck in conparison.
Gameboy emulators are now available again in the iOS app store or even as a a web app. Or just play on real hardware.
I think there's money to be made with both, but there's more money to be made by not maintaining two separate models, so ads win.
It's not that rare for games to offer a "remove ads" option for a few bucks. That model doesn't require a lot of extra "maintenance".
I think a few bucks for ad-free brings in more money for most developers, but that still pales in comparison to a recurring subscription model (or models where people keep spending in-app on consumables).
A penetrating observation that feels true. Too bad.
Oh, the Rubik's Cube app has both actually - the subscription gets rid of the ads you have to watch to get more solves.
This sort of nonsense is what I think will drive adoption of AI for personal apps. Tell it to create a ukulele tuning app and you get one without ads without subscription that you can make work exactly how you want. I wonder whether this is something that only privacy and tech oriented folk will do and care about our whether it will be adopted generally.
The source of this problem is that it costs $99/year + the churn of having to keep up with the latest ios api updates to have an app for iphones. Which kills the normal free software that would have filled this role. As well as the fact that the subscription apps can pay for adverts to sit at the top of the search results.
Once governments force Apple to allow sideloading we should get some kind of f-droid for ios which only lists open source user respecting apps.
Only applies to Android. Apple make it deliberately expensive to publish apps and deliberately annoying to run your own apps locally (have to refresh every 7 days).
Metronome apps are paid now or have an 'ad' tier. I took my money and spent it on a real metronome.
This is why some hardware is still supreme. I've had the same Korg chromatic tuner for 20 years and would not be in the least bit surprised if it goes for another 40.
Did you buy it or show them a better way of doing it?
Man, you don't want to know. But I guess I've answered you anyway.
There was some video on reddit that I saw the other day where a man struggled to take a photo with his camera app because it kept popping full screen ads in front of everything else.
Resume viewing... resume viewing...
Yeah, at that point it's better to buy an external lens for the Iphone. Single purchase and better pictures.
Or an actual camera that can afford more area for a non-miniature sensor.
Apple customers are just built different.
There is Halide which I find completely uninteresting because I have a Sony A7iv. (Funny my latest piece of “gear” I am learning to use is a selfie stick because I can do stuff like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/selfie and I don’t see third party apps really improve on the official camera)
I cannot see a meaningful difference at all in any of the example photos, so not really seeing what the point of this is.
maybe it's time to have your eyes checked.
If it works, Apple copies it soon enough...
There's nothing to copy. Apple's iOS Camera app already uses multi-camera image fusion in many cases. This app builds on the Multi-Camera AVCapture feature that Apple opened up in iOS 13.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/249/
So what's the value add here?
IIUC, it's the ability to export layered PSD files with images from multiple sensors.
Apple has done this (multi-camera/spatial fusion) since 2016, in addition to multi-frame/temporal fusion. The OS decides whether these techniques are worthwhile for any given shot based on context.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avcap...
They might acquire it and have done it in the past.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/06/apple-buy...
The principle is similar to foveated imaging [1].
Recently, Samsung introduced the ISOCELL platform which allows to select the area which will be recorded at higher resolution compared to other regions.
There can be all sorts of different applications build around such as extracting higher resolution of text regions, etc [2].
Of course, the lens needs to support this resolution but I think that will be default in the mid-term future.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging
[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3799902.3811218
Why do i need a subscription for a camera app?
The real answer: making money on the App Store is extremely difficult. Developers have worked out subscriptions make more money than one-off purchases over time, even if a large % of people will refuse to engage with them.
If a user gets value from an app month after month it makes sense for the user to pay for the value month after month.
By that logic, I should be paying Audi and Mazda a subscription for finding utility in the cars that sit in my driveway.
And Nike for the shoes on my feet.
From what I heard they're selling them at a loss and making it back by selling your data.
You can rent a car without buying it
Shoes and shirts and hats and bars of soap all should have a monthly subscription as well.
There are fashion subscriptions. Some people do not value being able to continually rewear clothes and would prefer to constantly having new clothes to show off.
By that logic they should charge per photo
That's what film cameras did once upon a time and the business model worked then.
No they didn't. In general the camera manufacturer is not the one you paid for film stock.
That's absurd. I've gotten value from my toilet plunger for years. Let me start charging you a toilet plunger subscription just for privilege of using it when you please. That's your logic.
My logic is that toilet plunger manufacturers will race to the bottom resulting in a subscriptionless plunger being the cheapest one.
Not a fan of “Photosynthesis” on the demo. Sliding between the two, “standard” looks clearer and cleaner.
This is interesting. I'm just curious to know how long will it survive until Apple adds something like that to their software. Do you have a fallback plan for this? But I must say that the idea is quite interesting.
Apple already does that since last year at least. In many situations if you 4x and put your finger on the 1x you’ll see the picture change. Sometimes massively
I'm so confused. Does the dev not know that this is what iPhones do by default?
Honestly, I assumed the stock phone apps are doing this by default. It would be stupid not to? It's like a low-hanging fruit present ever since phones started having multiple cameras on the back.
(EDIT: though the only real confirmation of this being done that I have is, Samsung's "Camera Assistant" addon has an option to enable "2x zoom" as separate button, and the description there states explicitly it's a synthetic zoom made from combining the main and telephoto camera.)
(EDIT2: come to think of it, for almost any regular mode, if I use my fingers to block two of the three cameras, the image is unchanged, which empirically proves at least Samsung is not doing this - which again makes me wonder, why not? It's an obvious thing to do.)
On that note, I don't understand why there's no widespread, genai-free apps for "super resolution" aka. take a video (or a burst photo shot) of a stationary thing and use it to reconstruct a single photo with much higher detail level.
For videos I can imagine the reason would be that video compression is literally doing the inverse of that (i.e. the information you'd need to reconstruct a higher-resolution image is exactly the one that the compressor throws away for 90% of the frames), so the algorithm and compressor would cancel out. But that doesn't explain why this doesn't seem to exist for burst photos.
I'm confused. So this is just producing a single photo that is clearer in a middle rectangle and blurrier outside that rectangle?
Of course the extra detail in the middle is nicer, but won't the edge of the "detail rectangle" be extremely obvious and distracting? Like when you zoom into satellite view on Maps and it's clear that there's a blurry area and a sharp area?
I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image. I can understand why you'd want to snap photos with both lenses simultaneously as save them as separate photos, but I don't understand why you'd combine them.
People do add fake depth of field to their photos that essentially has the same effect.
> I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image.
An image with the FOV of the wide-angle camera but the quality of the main one in the center? Assuming the border interpolation works well (which tbf is probably hard for close objects), why would anyone not want this?
>but won't the edge of the "detail rectangle" be extremely obvious and distracting?
Your own eyes work that way, so you tell me.
My eyes are also always focused at the center of what I'm seeing, as opposed to a picture that you can pan.
> So this is just producing a single photo that is clearer in a middle rectangle and blurrier outside that rectangle?
Yeah that looks to be the case. Not sure what use case this solves with that 'limitation'. I don't think photographers would particularly like this.
> I don't think photographers would particularly like this.
No we really don’t.
Left side and the right side look the same to me except some subtle differences in the color of shadows…. And another waitlist? Nein Danke.
Woah - Alexandra Palace spotted on the landing page?
I am co fused, 50% of photos look better in standard zoom and 50% of them look better woth photosynthesis. This is like an anti campaign for the app hinting "in the end it doesn't really matter"
I think this may be due to an issue I've had with loading the full res zoom images on the website, I've been going back and forth trying to balance the loading times and stress on the browser with clarity of the images. Working on a new idea now, so hopefully it'll give better demonstrations soon.
How can you in good conscience charge a subscription for this? It would be one thing if the app relied on infrastructure, but it's a one and done algorithm that's entirely local on device!
Subscriptions are charged because the developer needs to maintain the upkeep and cost of running the service, but that's not applicable here. It's capable of taking a million photographs fully offline, without any reliance on an online service.
Essentially you're saying your product is so superb that people should pay you indefinitely for the privilege of using it. Even though it costs you nothing to maintain, you somehow need people to perpetually pay you for a local, offline algorithm that you wrote one time. How gross, that's the definition of pointless greed.
Shame on you, honestly. This is exactly what's wrong with modern software nowadays. Just like Adobe and all these other companies, taking advantage of people to milk them dry forever. You'll lease a product, you won't have the right to own anything, and you'll be happy about it.
> Essentially you're saying your product is so superb that people should pay you indefinitely for the privilege of using it.
Also, this part sounds like something to aspire to. RuneScape did an alright job :)
>It would be one thing if the app relied on infrastructure
Look into value based pricing. It's a mistake to charge based on how much something costs you to produce.
As an example, if I make an SEO tweak that makes a company an extra $10M in profit a year, should I charge for the hour of effort it took? Or should I charge differently?
Why is it a mistake? I mean, I know value based pricing is _possible_, but you're saying it's the only way?
Very cool stuff, I've long thought there must be some fancy ways to get extra information for better image resolution by taking advantage of the other cameras.
That said, I must also say that most of the side-by-side comparison photos shown here are somewhat impressive, and in some cases, the photosynthesis one just looks worse to my untrained eye.
_______________
I'll choose to take this as evidence of the fact that you're tacking a very difficult problem, and you're also being honest in your comparisons and not cherry-picking too aggressively.
As dole alluded to below, I have been going back and forth in balancing the quality of the example pictures with the data load. I've pushed an update to the site now that weighs much more towards quality for this exact reason! But you're right, I don't want to hide the fact that not all results are perfect.
Some of the photosynthesis zoom-ins have overlays take a bit longer to load at higher resolution.
I think this is actually how oneplus phones have taken 'night' mode photos for a very long time in their default camera app, it takes multiple exposures and uses the movement sensor in the phone to pick several which were taken with the least hand jitter, and then stacks them into the final result.
I believe that's true for most/all night capture, but they take sequential frames from the same lens rather than combining multiple lenses.
Nice idea.
On my phone, at least, I had to pintch-to-zoom to 2-3X to see the difference.
And at that size, the “synthesized” version looks much sharper.
You might need more cropping for the mobile version. At 1X I couldn’t tell them apart.
Haven’t checked the desktop version yet
How is parallax error solved? The two cameras don't share the same optics center.
Parallax error decreases significantly when lens are close enough and these are mm apart. They are close enough that you can probably just play a perspective trick and hide any artifacts.
I want to know what is possible if there were triple the number of cameras on the back of the phone and every single one fired on every photo. If they all focused at different points, the telephotos zoomed at different lengths etc., maybe throw some infrared cameras on there as well, what would be the results when combined?
There is a much better way of doing this which some professional cameras do called pixel shift. It shifts the sensor a tiny amount in between multiple exposures to compose in to an absurdly high resolution image. The downside is it only works on a tripod since you need the camera perfectly still.
The obvious issue with multiple cameras at different focal lengths is they won't all cover the frame of the widest one so only parts of the image will be sharper.
But if this matters to you, just get a full frame camera. Any 33MP full frame will blow away a 200MP phone camera in sharpness and detail.
I wasn't thinking so much about resolution, but rather all the other things it might allow. Re-focusing after taking it, for example. 3D by default, since the width of a phone is basically the distance between your eyes. A host of other things the much-more-high-powered CPU on the phone can do compared to a camera.
For refocusing, you can achieve this with focus bracketing, the camera takes the same photo at different focus points in quick succession. The reason phone default camera apps don't have this as a feature is because their depth of field is so massive that pretty much everything is in focus all the time anyway. But it's a feature on dedicated cameras.
>3D by default
This actually is an option in the ios camera app if you switch to spacial mode. Though I think the only use case is they look slightly nicer on the Apple vision pro. And also the iphone can just fake 3D on any photo with AI.
If there was a compelling reason to cover the phone in more cameras and sell it as a feature, Samsung would have done it by now.
The Apple spatial photos are enabled by the depth camera, right? Which is kind of my point - more cameras mean more features!
> If there was a compelling reason to cover the phone in more cameras and sell it as a feature, Samsung would have done it by now.
I dunno, they generally tend to be a follower, not a leader. Even their new foldable is generally accepted as a tactical manoeuver ahead of Apple's foldable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_(company)
Good review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3uUozW4zHc
That definitely looks like what I imagined.
you don't need subscription model, just one price for lifetime - that will be fair and convert better.
don't do trials - do refund within 28 days
I believe this is something similar to what Lytro aimed to bring to market.
Lytro, Inc. was an American company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng which developed some of the first commercially available light-field cameras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro
No, that's a fundamentally different kind of lens.
This might be a personal preference thing, but in every single example photo on that page, I significantly prefer the colours in the "standard zoom" version of the photo. I wonder if they can figure out how to do this fusion without losing that beautiful contrast the zoom lens brings to the table?
That's really interesting - the colour match attempts to find the best match between the two lens outputs, which frequently results in them 'meeting in the middle'. You can then manually adjust the output of each lens within the app's editing interface. I'll have a think about the weighting of the colour match.
This was actually a purported feature of the Pixel 3 camera. Google said it would be constantly taking photos and the different information captured as your hand moved slightly could be used to create higher information density photos. It didn't work very well at that point but the idea was cool!
That's not what's being described here. It's just combining the telephoto and wide angle photos.
I believe that's a similar idea to Apple's Deep Fusion which also takes multiple frames from the same lens then intelligently combines them for higher detail. As ipsum2 said below, that's different to Photosynthesis, which captures from different lenses simultaneously.
very cool app, a few questions: why does the color "temp" of the image change between traditional iphone photography vs your app? it appears to both warm and cool the images. Also why is the contrast decreased, specifically in the library/book store example?
I like the idea of this app and the website is well done. Subscription isn't for me, but for folks who take a lot of photos and need this sort of thing, I can see it. Free tier could offer a few more photos per month.
Anyone know if they’re using the native camera resolution for the zoomed part or doing sensor fusion to get better quality than either alone?
I tried this using TestFlight but I get the distinct feeling that this is (1) vibe coded (and as a consequence, a fair bit of AI slop, you can even tell from the UI) (2) Slow and bloated from the get go - just look at the download size, nearly 170MB (3) Also the results are disappoint to say the least.
So maybe other people find more value in this, but it's off my TestFlight for now.
That demo looks like Minority Report level enhancement. Amazing if it really works, but I'll be damned if I'm paying for a SaaS camera app.
Isn't quite a lot of modern smartphone photography post-processing? Yes camera SAAS is extremely funny but I can kinda see it maybe
Awesome work. Now to bring back the fusing of several images into a true high res pano! Not the garbage native “pano” mode but a true stitched mosaic.
nicer comparison site: https://slow.pics/c/xpGfe2hK
Interesting. I wonder if this could be extended to take MPO 3D photos.
That is something I want to look at post-1.0-launch.
nice one!
Sily question... why not all 3
All 3 is in the app! It's a much harder challenge to deal with the parallax and other artefacts that come up from combining 3 lenses, so that particular feature is launching in beta.
Leading with a concert photo example is cringe. Camera phones are a scourge on the concert experience. It should not be encouraged.
this seems to be legit
Anything like this for Android or Pixels?
That is a fantastic name.
Thank you! I was very happy when I came up with it
My hesitations on this are it stores data in a proprietary format that I may not be able to export to another common format if the product disappears in a few years.
For something personal like photos and the memories they capture, that's not ideal for me.
While the app is still with us, I'm not sure how much it will cost me to export to my photos to my photo library each month.
There is zero lock-in with the files being saved - you can export from the app in HEIC/PNG/JPEG as well as PSD and spatial/SBS 3D. The format the website calls the 'Photosynthesis' file is an HEIC so even if you export that you can still access the data outside of the app.
Unlimited exports of the composite images are part of the subscription (with an option to automatically export to Photos.app and/or a folder of your choosing), but the free tier still offers unlimited saving of the constituent images e.g. the wide & tele shots, just not the composite.
"This site was paused as it reached its usage limits. Please contact the site owner for more information."
It's back now!
FYI you're serving multi-megabyte images on your landing page that could effectively be thumbnails.
Similar idea to the discontinued Light L16 camera https://petapixel.com/2017/12/08/review-light-l16-brilliant-...
That looks insane, definitely a trypophobia trigger!
This appears to use a naïve masking approach (using ML to find the edges of the mask) which seems to suffer from slight uncorrected differences in lens distortion. There's a fairly obvious feathering around the edges of the detailed area, objects shift quite dramatically, and overall I feel like I'd do a better job of this manually. It is a cool idea, but flawed execution. I would prefer something like using ML to generate a displacement map between the wide angle and the narrow angle parts. That way you can map the higher details down faithfully without having to feather the edges nearly as much or compute any mask. That would also solve parallax which I see also looks unaccounted for.
Weird issue: The iPhone dropdown doesn't include the iPhone XR. It's not like I expect it to work, I'm just curious what the app does.
This whole thing feels wrong. OP should be working for a phone manufacturer, not trying to sell this as a subscription. How much is it worth to be able to squeeze a little more visual clarity out of my phone? Maybe $20 maximum? And I feel like I’m on the generous side of the population here. Most people will say $0. But if you’re inside of Apple and you can tell them you can add an average of $1 of perceived value to each of their millions of phones sold each year they’ll be over the moon and you can get a fat salary.
As an Android guy and not an iPhone, or phone pic guy...
What do the multiple lenses do then, if not this? Like,I presumed that was the point.
Are they LITERALLY just decoration for me to make fun of?
Some older android phones like the Huawei P20 Pro had a combination of 40 MP main sensor and 8 MP monochrome sensor and combined them to produce a better image. But modern phones tend to have zoom, normal and wide-angle lenses which don't overlap in any meaningful sense.
Your idea about combining two lenses to make a better quality image could also be done with a single lens, just taking more photos in a row. Almost all phones (iOS/Android) do this for you already.
Different optical zoom levels.
Many phones already use information from both cameras, too.
Android phones have multiple cameras too.
Normal, wide, and zoomed
This has to be bait right? They’re different lenses with different focal lengths. Same as on Android phones with more than one lens.
Is it just me or do the original photos look better overall?
Not just the app idea … but the WEBSITE — is VERY WELL DONE.
I immediately signed up. (And offered to help bring users to this thing.)
Thank you very much, that's really appreciated! Just added all the new sign-ups to the TestFlight, looking forward to hearing what you all think.