Nimbus Synth vs Granula
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side ā with what reviewers say about each.
Nimbus Synth
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Nimbus Synth is an ambient instrument you play by moving. No keys, no piano roll, no menus to learn. Tilt your phone, drag a finger across the screen, and slow, evolving drones grow out of the motion. Every gesture shapes the sound in real time. SIX VOICES Layer up to six ambient timbres: Sub Drone, Warm Pad, Glass, Air, Metallic, Cello Dark, each with its own character, sculpted through tilt and touch. ALWAYS IN KEY Seven scale modes and note-exclusion keep whatever you play in tune with itself. No wrong notes. LOOP AND LAYER Record a phrase, loop it, and keep playing on top. Quantize to tempo, add a metronome with time signatures and subdivisions, and build a piece one layer at a time. SAVE YOUR IDEAS Keep a library of recordings and slot presets to return to later. NIMBUS SYNTH PRO A one-time unlock, no subscription: ⢠Unlimited saved ideas and presets ⢠Export recordings as WAV and MIDI (free tier exports MP3) ⢠MIDI Out: send what you play live to a DAW or hardware synth over Network MIDI Made for headphones, a quiet room, and a phone in your hand.
Granula
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Granula is a granular synthesizer for the phone. It takes a sound from demo samples (like guitar, calimba, tongue drum, etc.) or thirty seconds you record on the spot and scatters it into hundreds of tiny overlapping grains. A slow, shifting texture comes back to your space: ambient pads, drones, atmospheres that keep evolving as long as you keep listening. Everything is played with your hands. The whole screen is a morph pad: move a finger across it and the sound moves with you, while a field of glyphs lights up under your touch and churns in time with what you hear. FOUR CHARACTERS ⢠Reverse: short grains, played mostly backwards, with octave and fifth sparkles on top ⢠Gater: a denser cloud chopped on a grid, from halves down to sixteenths ⢠Chorus: long, slow, detuned grains with the read position drifting like a tide ⢠Scatter: harmonic intervals thrown at random and sprayed wide FOUR KNOBS ⢠Grain size, from 15 ms clicks to 1 second ⢠Position: where in the sample the grains are lifted from ⢠Density: from sparse drips to a solid wash ⢠Dry/Wet: a six-second convolution reverb, plus the amount of reversed grains RECORD THE WORLD AROUND Hold the record button and capture up to thirty seconds of anything: your voice, a room, rain on a window, a string you plucked once. The take is granulated immediately and kept in your library under a name of its own. You can also import your own MP3 or WAV files. MADE FOR A PHONE ⢠Keeps playing with the screen locked and in the background ⢠Survives calls, headphone unplugs and output switches without losing your session ⢠Any class-compliant USB or Bluetooth MIDI keyboard plays it - plug in and go, nothing to pair inside the app GRANULA PRO Every built-in sound is free and stays free. A free account also brings in one sound of your own - recorded or imported. Granula Pro lifts that limit: record and import as much as you like, and everything syncs to your account so a new phone picks up where the last one left off. No ads. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is iOS requirement: Nimbus Synth at 15.1 against Granula's 17.0. On price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price Ā· Rating Ā· Positive reviews Ā· Number of ratings Ā· Update frequency Ā· Ads Ā· In-app purchases Ā· Monetization Ā· Best chart rank Ā· Devices Ā· Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Nimbus Synth sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Granula sells 1 in-app purchase, starting at $2.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Nimbus Synth ships an update weekly, Granula every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on October 29, 2026 and November 6, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Nimbus Synth | Granula |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Weekly | Every 5 days ā better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod ā better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 15.1 ā better | 17.0 |
| Further details ā not scored | ||
| Size | 38 MB | 10 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Ondre Studios, LDA | Sergey Duzhev |
In-app purchases
Nimbus Synth
- Nimbus Synth Pro$6.99
Granula
- Granula Pro$2.991 Month
Questions
Is Nimbus Synth free?
Is Granula free?
Do Nimbus Synth or Granula have ads?
Which is updated more often, Nimbus Synth or Granula?
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