Comparison

PhotosOne vs Starlapse

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

PhotosOne

Capture, store, and organize your cherished memories with a beautifully designed camera and gallery app. Features an immersive preview, smart organization, and seamless recovery of deleted photos.

Highlights
  • Immersive camera preview
  • Sleek, modern interface
  • Smart photo organization
  • Unlimited custom albums
  • Recently deleted photo recovery
  • Performance enhancements
Features
Read full description

Bringing an innovative, lovely designed and significant improvement to capturing lifes most cherished moments, all in one easy to use, beautifilly designed piece of software. PhotosOne brings the ability to capture and store photos from the most elegant looking camera feature,and stores your photos in your gallary in the library tab, where you can create unlimited specific albums with your favorite photos and also easily access recently deleted photos for seamless recovery.PhotosOne brings your memories into focus with a modern camera experience and a beautifully refined design. Highlights: Immersive Camera Preview — See the world in vibrant detail with a redesigned camera preview that makes every shot come alive. LiquidGlass Design — Experience a sleek, modern interface that feels fluid, light, and perfectly at home on iPhone. Smarter Organization — Your photos and moments are easier to find, manage, and revisit. Performance Enhancements — Faster, smoother, and more reliable than ever. Why You’ll Love It: Simple & Elegant: A clean interface that stays out of your way so you can focus on the shot. Powerful Features: Take photos, preview instantly, and manage your gallery in one place. Built for iOS 26: Optimized for the latest iPhone devices and system design. Whether you’re capturing a quick moment or organizing years of memories, PhotosOne makes it effortless — and beautiful.

About

Starlapse

Capture stunning long-exposure night sky photos with advanced manual controls and frame stacking. This app offers precise focus on starlight, a meteor detector, and celestial aiming overlays for astrophotography on your phone.

Highlights
  • Manual camera controls (ISO, shutter, focus, white balance)
  • Autofocus on starlight
  • Frame stacking for long exposures
  • Pinpoint stars and star trails modes
  • Night time-lapse creation
  • Meteor detector
  • Celestial aiming overlays
Features
Read full description

Photograph the night sky properly, on a phone that was never meant to. Starlapse locks the camera and keeps it locked. ISO, shutter, focus, white balance — set them once and they stay there for the whole session. No creeping exposure, no autofocus hunting in the dark and landing on nothing, no auto white balance turning the sky orange under a streetlight. Then it does the thing the hardware cannot do alone. An iPhone sensor caps a single frame at about one second, so exposures longer than that are built by stacking hundreds of frames. That is not a workaround — it is better. Noise falls as the square root of the frame count, and the same night's light can be developed as pinpoint stars or as star trails afterwards, because nothing is thrown away. WHAT IT DOES • Manual camera that holds — ISO, frame exposure, focus, white balance, lens choice • Autofocus on starlight — steps the lens and measures star size, the way observatories focus • Self-timer, 3 or 10 seconds, so touching the phone does not shake the first frames • Stacking from 10 seconds to a full hour of collected light • Pinpoint stars — frames aligned on the stars themselves, so they stay points • Star trails — the sky's rotation drawn as arcs, ground kept sharp • Night time-lapse where every frame of the video is its own stack • Meteor detector — watches the sky and saves a short clip around anything that crosses it • Aiming overlay showing planets, bright stars and the Moon — tap any of them for its name, constellation and brightness WHERE TO POINT Most apps show you where a shower's radiant is. Starlapse tells you where to aim, which is not the same place: meteors streak away from the radiant, so the longest trails appear 40° off to the side. It works that out from your location and the time, keeps you clear of the Moon, and picks a height a tripod can actually hold. FOCUS, WHICH IS THE HARD PART Autofocus cannot see a night sky — there is no contrast to hunt on — and the infinity mark is not exactly infinity: it is a mechanical end stop, and the sharp point sits slightly inside it, at a place that differs between lenses and drifts as the phone cools. Starlapse steps the lens across its range, measures how large the stars come out at each position, and settles on the smallest. It takes about a minute. DEVELOP AFTERWARDS The stack is kept as accumulated light, not as a finished picture. When the exposure ends you can move the curve (stretch, black point, exposure, saturation) and it re-develops from the original data. Same latitude a RAW file gives you. The curve is asinh, the one professional astronomical imaging uses. It lifts the faint Milky Way out of the noise while bright stars keep their cores and their colour instead of clipping to white discs. HONEST LIMITS • Aperture is fixed on iPhone. It is a property of the lens, not a setting. The app shows the f-number and what each lens gives up, and lets you choose — that is all any app can do here. • A single frame is about one second. Everything longer is stacked, and the interface always shows the arithmetic: "10 min of light = 600 × 1.00s". • Capture cannot run in the background. iOS stops the camera when an app leaves the screen. Starlapse keeps the screen on and dims it instead. • You need a tripod. An hour of stacking on a handheld phone is an hour of nothing. PRIVACY No account. Location and motion are used on the device to work out where to aim. What leaves the phone: the optional purchase below, to Apple; a usage counter you can switch off; and, only if you say yes, sky readings and photos for a light-pollution dataset (location to ~10 km, deletable in Settings). Source: github.com/fortunto2/starlapse. STARLAPSE PRO Everything above is free and stays free. Pro is the sky's events, bought once: tonight's showers with their rates, the aim target 40° off the radiant and clear of the Moon, and peak nights. Comets, eclipses and dark frames join Pro at no further cost.

Screenshots

PhotosOne4 screens
Starlapse4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is rating: Starlapse at 5.0 against PhotosOne's 3.0. Starlapse also leads on update cadence (weekly vs monthly) and iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.0). PhotosOne's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 1). On price, review sentiment, ratings volume and ads 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Starlapse sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. PhotosOne asks for nothing beyond the download.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

Starlapse holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 3.0. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 1 and 1 respectively. Written reviews split almost evenly too, at 100% and 100% positive.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

PhotosOne ships an update monthly, Starlapse weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 30, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard4 real differences · 6 level
PhotosOne versus Starlapse: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPhotosOneStarlapse
PriceFreeFree
Rating3.0 (1 ratings)5.0 (1 ratings) — better
Positive reviews100.0% of reviews100.0% of reviews
Number of ratings11
Update frequencyMonthlyWeekly — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNo — betterYes
MonetizationFreeFree
DevicesiPhone, iPad — betteriPhone
Requires iOS26.018.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size10 MB3 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperBrady PollockRustam SALAVATOV

Customer experience

PhotosOne

All ratings1 ratings
Positive0.0%
Neutral100.0%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews1 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

Starlapse

All ratings1 ratings
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews1 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

In-app purchases

None

PhotosOne

No in-app purchases

1 purchases

Starlapse

One-time1
  • Starlapse Pro$4.99

Questions

Is PhotosOne free?
PhotosOne is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Starlapse free?
Starlapse is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Which has better reviews, PhotosOne or Starlapse?
Starlapse is rated higher. PhotosOne averages 3.0 out of 5 from 1 ratings, while Starlapse averages 5.0 from 1 ratings.
Do PhotosOne or Starlapse have ads?
Neither PhotosOne nor Starlapse shows ads.
Which is updated more often, PhotosOne or Starlapse?
PhotosOne ships an update monthly, and Starlapse weekly. Most recently, PhotosOne was updated on October 30, 2026 and Starlapse on October 31, 2026.

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