NEON Game of Life vs Life II
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
NEON Game of Life
Experience a unique zero-player game with a vibrant neon aesthetic. Set up initial patterns on an 80x80 grid and watch them evolve. Save, share, and experiment with different rulesets for endless possibilities.
- Zero-player simulation
- Neon graphics
- 80x80 grid
- Pattern checkpoints
- Pattern sharing
- Multiple rulesets
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NEON is Conway's Game of Life, reborn in neon. Paint a handful of glowing cells, hit play, and watch them breed, drift, and collide — gliders streak across the grid, pulsars breathe, and a Gosper gun throws spaceships into the dark. It's a sandbox, not a screensaver. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free. THE SIMULATION — free — 12 rulesets: Conway (B3/S23), HighLife, Day & Night, Amoeba, Mazectric, Coral, Diamoeba and more — plus a B/S rule builder for your own totalistic rules. — Toroidal grids sized to your device, driven by a GPU compute kernel that keeps up. — A per-cell procedural neon shader — no sprites; every living cell is drawn live. PAINT & EDIT — free — Paint or erase with a fingertip; a live loupe magnifies exactly the cell under your finger. — Region select: marquee any rectangle, then copy, cut, clear, save as a snippet, or export as RLE. Paste it anywhere. — 20 canonical snippets (block, glider, LWSS, pulsar, queen-bee shuttle…) with live toroidal previews. Drag to stamp; rotate or flip before you drop. — Symmetry brush — 2-, 4-, or 8-fold mirrored drawing. — Full LifeWiki RLE round-trip: paste, fetch from a URL, or open a .rle file, plus a raw-text editor over the live grid. STUDY — free — A 15-pattern Discover catalog: Gosper gun, Simkin gun, acorn, R-pentomino, replicator, garden of Eden — with provenance. — Timeline scrubber — pause and rewind all the way back to the first generation. — Population sparkline, live cell count, generation counter, and stability detection (still life / period-N oscillator / extinction). — Minimap and stats HUD, both toggleable right on the canvas. SHARE — free — Pattern links: every soup encodes into a neongameoflife:// URL you can drop in a message. No server, no account. — Record the canvas to MP4 or GIF. Full iPad keyboard shortcuts. NEON PRO — optional A one-time purchase, family-shareable, no subscription. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free; Pro is the finish — more speed, surface, and instrumentation. — Fast-forward to 1,000 generations/second. — Arbitrary grid sizes and a 16×16 custom snippet creator. — iCloud sync of your library across devices. — An interactive Home Screen widget and a Dynamic Island Live Activity, each running a live mini-sim. — Pattern labels that identify gliders, oscillators, and still lifes and track them as they move. — An activity heatmap that renders cell-flip frequency as a cool-to-hot overlay. — A 3D time-stack you can orbit — every generation stacked in space, from a single instanced draw. — A neon palette editor, animated themes, and cell trails. — 15 alternate app icons drawn from classic patterns. PRIVACY No accounts, no tracking, no third-party SDKs, no analytics. Your patterns live on your device and, if you opt in, in your own iCloud private database. Share links carry the pattern inline — nothing touches a server. Built in Swift + SwiftUI, from a 2019 SpriteKit experiment rebuilt from the compute kernel up.
Life II
Explore John Horton Conway's Game of Life with customizable resolutions and speeds. Features a built-in editor with copy-paste functionality for running patterns from online libraries.
- Conway's Game of Life simulation
- Adjustable resolutions and speeds
- Built-in pattern editor
- Copy-paste pattern functionality
- Supports online pattern libraries
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John Horton Conway's Game of Life. Supports different resolutions and speeds, and has a built-in editor. The editor supports copy & paste, so you can run stock patterns from pattern libraries found on the Internet.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: NEON Game of Life at every 2 days against Life II's every 5 months. NEON Game of Life also leads on review sentiment (90% vs 67%) and ratings volume (7 vs 2). Life II's advantage is iOS requirement (11.0 vs 18.0). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases 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
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.4 for NEON Game of Life against 4.5 for Life II. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 7 and 2 respectively. Written reviews are what separate them: 90% of NEON Game of Life's written reviews are positive against 67% of Life II's.
NEON Game of Life ships an update every 2 days, Life II every 5 months. The most recent releases landed on September 8, 2026 and September 23, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | NEON Game of Life | Life II |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.4 (7 ratings) | 4.5 (2 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 90.0% of reviews — better | 66.7% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 7 — better | 2 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 days — better | Every 5 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 11.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 26 MB | 0 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Enzo Maruffa | Thomas Okken |
Customer experience
NEON Game of Life
Life II
In-app purchases
NEON Game of Life
No in-app purchases
Life II
No in-app purchases







