New Pixels vs Afterglow
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
New Pixels
Explore a unique pixel art creation experience using basic shapes and colors. Craft your own miniature worlds and share them with a community gallery or friends. This app offers a creative outlet inspired by renowned artists.
- Unique pixel art creation
- Basic shapes and colors
- World building
- Share art with friends
- Cloud gallery submission
- Inspired by artists
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Love pixel art? This is a new form of pixel art you gotta check out. Using basic shapes and colors and a sprinkle of imagination, a little world is swirling under your fingertips. Share your art with friends or post it to our cloud gallery, we'd love to stumble upon your little world of new pixels :) Quotes from our favorite artists: "Using #newpixelsapp is my self care." - Ken Wong, lead designer of mobile game Monument Valley & Florence. "New Pixels puts me in such a fun state. Different than doodling... though oddly similar. Like solving a tough puzzle and not knowing where I'm going at the same time." - Bob Flynn, cartoonist & character designer. (We follow CC BY-SA Copyright License for user uploaded artwork)
Afterglow
This app provides a professional audio mastering process specifically designed for ambient music. It offers automated starting points and a five-stage signal chain to enhance tonal shaping, harmonic warmth, cohesion, stereo imaging, and final limiting for immersive soundscapes.
- Automated audio analysis and configuration
- Five-stage mastering signal chain
- Tonal shaping with tilt EQ and shelves
- Harmonic saturation for analogue warmth
- Bus compression for cohesion
- Mid/side processing for stereo field enhancement
- True-peak look-ahead limiter
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Your music deserves a proper ending. Not a rough export left to chance, not a generic limiter slapped across the master bus and hoped for the best, but a real finishing process that treats your music with the care it took to make it. Afterglow is a complete mastering processor built exclusively for ambient music, and everything about it, from the signal chain to the controls to the way it thinks about loudness, has been designed around what ambient music actually needs. Drone, dark ambient, field recordings, sleep music, cinematic textures, generative soundscapes: whatever corner of the ambient world you work in, Afterglow speaks your language. Auto: Your Instant Starting Point Load your finished track into Afterglow, press Auto, and watch it work. Auto analyses your audio in full, reading its loudness, spectral character, low-end weight, high-frequency energy, and peak levels, then sets a complete starting configuration across every module. In seconds, you have a considered, intelligent first pass across the entire chain, ready for you to refine. It is the kind of head start that used to require either years of experience or a lot of expensive time in someone else's studio. A Five-Stage Chain Built for Atmosphere: Bloom opens the chain with tonal shaping: a tilt EQ that shifts the entire spectral balance warmer or brighter in a single move, a sub shelf for adding foundation to deep drones or taming an unruly low end, an air shelf that brings shimmer and life to reverb tails and soft pads, and a rumble filter that quietly removes the subsonic frequencies your ears cannot hear but your limiter absolutely can. A real-time spectrum analyser shows you the full picture as you work. Glow adds harmonic warmth through gentle saturation, coaxing the kind of analogue richness out of a digital recording that makes it feel like something was always there rather than something that was added. The right amount of Glow is the amount you cannot quite identify, only appreciate. Glue brings the track together. As a bus compressor voiced specifically for slow-moving, dynamic material, it adds cohesion and weight without flattening the life out of your music. Parallel compression blending lets you dial in as much presence as you want while keeping the natural rise and fall of your dynamics completely intact. Space transforms the stereo field using mid/side processing, widening the image, shifting the balance between the centre and the sides, or softening the outer edges with diffusion so that reverbs and textures feel less like a stereo recording and more like a surrounding environment. This is where ambient music becomes immersive. Lift closes the chain with a true-peak look-ahead limiter that brings your master to its final level cleanly and safely. Set your ceiling, bring up the gain, and let Lift protect the output without leaving a fingerprint on the music. Ambient masters tend to breathe more freely at a moderate level, and Lift is designed with that in mind. A Complete Ambient Mastering Workflow in Your Hands As a standalone app, Afterglow is a full "finalizing" environment. Import your audio, run Auto, shape the result with the five modules, and export directly to WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, or AAC at up to 32-bit float quality, all processed offline at full resolution. As an AUv3 plugin, it drops straight into any compatible host or DAW on your master bus. Your music spent hours, weeks, or months being built into something worth hearing. Afterglow is how it gets finished. Important Information: Afterglow works on iPhone, but was built for iPad. Please consider this before purchase. The "Auto" feature is only present in the standalone version of the app, not the AUv3 extension. This is because the analyser needs to read the full audio file from start to finish for best results. Afterglow is not a replacement for professional mastering, but a tool for adding a final polish to your ambient tracks.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ratings volume: New Pixels at 415 against Afterglow's 5. New Pixels also leads on price ($3.99 vs $7.99) and iOS requirement (12.0 vs 17.0). Afterglow's advantage is rating (5.0 vs 4.7) and review sentiment (100% vs 78%). On ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
New Pixels costs $3.99 and Afterglow $7.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Afterglow holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.7. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: New Pixels has 415 ratings behind it against 5, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 78% of New Pixels's written reviews are positive against 100% of Afterglow's.
| Parameter | New Pixels | Afterglow |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $3.99 — better | $7.99 |
| Rating | 4.7 (415 ratings) | 5.0 (5 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 77.6% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 415 — better | 5 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks | — |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free — better | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 11 MB | 21 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | 丽 张 | LEWIS GARETH K LE VAL |
Customer experience
New Pixels
Afterglow
Bugs and requests
New Pixels
Reported bugs
11 issues- Canvas erased when changing size
- Upload/server functionality broken since server downtime
- App crashes when changing language settings
- iPad version stuck in foreign language
- Login authentication failing with correct credentials
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- Account creation button hidden behind keyboard
- Export to Photos not working (only Dropbox works)
- Top menu buttons inaccessible (grid size, grid lines)
- Image quality becomes fuzzy/has JPEG artifacts when saved
- Shapes not aligning properly
- Keyboard not dismissing after signup on iPad
Requested features
17 requests- Dark mode
- Larger canvas size options beyond 18x18
- Ability to lock selected shapes to avoid reselection
- Extended undo/redo history (multiple steps)
- More color combinations and wider color palette
Show 12 moreShow fewer
- Symmetry tool
- Shape rotation capability
- Landscape mode support
- PNG and SVG export support
- Color wheel for precise color selection
- Multi-finger undo/redo gestures (like Procreate)
- Artist follow/gallery features
- Ability to expand canvas without losing work
- Copy and paste functionality
- More shape variety
- Ability to drag elements
- Account recovery/forgot password feature
Afterglow
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
New Pixels
No in-app purchases
Afterglow
No in-app purchases









