Comparison

DoomFracting vs Heaton Life

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

Head to head
About

DoomFracting

Features
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Stop doomscrolling. Start DoomFracting. Trade the endless newsfeed for the infinite beauty of nature's most famous mathematical landscape. DoomFracting turns complex mathematics into a mesmerizing, stress-relieving journey. Built around the legendary equation Zₙ₊₁ = Zₙ² + C, this app lets you zoom endlessly into the Mandelbrot set—a shape where complexity never ends, no matter how deep you go. Inspired by Benoit Mandelbrot's realization that "clouds aren't spheres, and mountains aren't cones," DoomFracting bridges the gap between scientific history, raw math, and pure visual art. Why You'll Love It: • (Almost!) Infinite Discovery: Deep, fluid zooming through never-ending self-similar structures. • Bite-Sized History: Learn how Benoit Mandelbrot, Gaston Julia, and early IBM computers unlocked fractal geometry. • Accessible Math: Enjoy clear, approachable explanations—from Z₀ = 0 to complex plane dynamics. No degree in mathematics required. • Distraction-Free Experience: Pure geometry, historical depth, and effortless exploration designed to give your brain a better kind of infinity. New Since Launch: • Bookmarks: Save the exact location, zoom level, palette, and shading of a view you love, and jump back to it anytime. Share any bookmark as a real link—AirDrop, Messages, email, anywhere—that opens straight to that view on someone else's iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Vision Pro, even if they've never saved a palette of their own. Comes with 14 real, hand-researched locations built in—Seahorse Valley, Elephant Valley, the Feigenbaum point, and more—plus an Online Library with 18 further deep cuts to download. • Auto-Pilot Exploration: Flip on AUTO and let DoomFracting drift deeper into the set on its own, surfacing fresh boundary detail every few seconds — a hands-free, screensaver-style tour you can step into or out of anytime. • Save Your Favorite Moments: Record the current view's color animation as a looping video clip, saved straight to your Photos library. • Apple Watch Companion: See your live Mandelbrot — or Julia, with a double-tap — mirrored right on your wrist as you explore. • Lock Screen & Home Screen Widget: Keep your last discovery glanceable from StandBy, your Lock Screen, or your Home Screen. • Palette Library: Save, import, share, rename, and duplicate your own color palettes as real Fractint-style .map files — plus an Online Library of curated palettes you can browse and add to your collection in one tap. • Full-Screen Julia in Landscape: Rotate sideways and tap the corner tag to swap your whole screen over to the Julia set for wherever you're currently zoomed — a genuinely different, connected fractal shape for the same spot, one tap away, with its own palette-animation recording. Replace aimless scrolling with mathematical wonder. Download DoomFracting today.

About

Heaton Life

Features
Read full description

Heaton Life is an app for exploring emergence: simple rules that grow complex, organic, surprisingly lifelike behavior. It brings the classic systems of artificial life together in one place, lets you paint and edit them, breeds brand-new rules, and keeps everything you make in a library of worlds. TEN KINDS OF LIFE • MergeLife — colorful cellular automata where every rule is a hex code. Start from the gallery of featured rules, then breed your own. • Life-like — Conway's Game of Life and its relatives: HighLife, Seeds, Day & Night, or any B/S rulestring you type. • Elementary — Wolfram's one-dimensional rules 0–255, drawn one row per generation. • Cyclic — states that consume one another into spirals and demons. • Wireworld — electrons on wires. Build circuits from the included clock and diode. • Lenia — three flavors (Classic, Asymptotic, Flow) of continuous Life, where smooth, gliding creatures emerge. • Gray-Scott — reaction-diffusion chemistry: spots, stripes, and dividing blobs. • Reynolds boids — flocking with no grid at all. Tap to scatter the flock. FOUR FRACTALS Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, and Newton. Tap to recenter, pinch or scroll to zoom — up to a trillion times (10¹²), with the center tracked precisely enough that the image never smears at depth. Or tap Auto and let the app dive toward the boundary by itself. PAINT, SELECT, PASTE Every world is editable without resetting it. Paint with each family's own ink — states, colors, intensities, chemistry — select and copy regions, paste with rotate and flip, and undo up to 24 steps. Paste accepts standard RLE text straight from LifeWiki, and the pattern zoo ships with gliders, spaceships, oscillators, methuselahs, the Gosper glider gun, HighLife's replicator, and Wireworld's clock and diode, alongside anything you capture yourself. BREED NEW RULES The built-in evolver is a genetic algorithm that breeds MergeLife rules and scores each one by how interesting its world stays over time, the way the original research trainer did. Watch the current best run live, keep the champions in a Finds catalog, open any find as a world, and decode any rule in the Rule Lab. A LIBRARY OF WORLDS Worlds are born saved: every world and fractal expedition lands in your library with a live thumbnail, saves itself when you leave, and reopens exactly where it was: same state, same generation. Name them, favorite them, snapshot any view to PNG, and import RLE patterns or MergeLife PNG exports.

Screenshots

DoomFracting4 screens
Heaton Life4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is device support: DoomFracting at 6 against Heaton Life's 4. On price, ads, in-app purchases and iOS requirement 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. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

Scorecard1 real difference · 5 level
DoomFracting versus Heaton Life: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterDoomFractingHeaton Life
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 2 days—
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Vision Pro — betteriPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac
Requires iOS16.015.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size3 MB82 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperEmmanuel VialeJeffrey Heaton

In-app purchases

None

DoomFracting

No in-app purchases

None

Heaton Life

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is DoomFracting free?
DoomFracting is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Heaton Life free?
Heaton Life is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do DoomFracting or Heaton Life have ads?
Neither DoomFracting nor Heaton Life shows ads.

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