Comparison

RetroFold vs Dotwave

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

Head to head
About

RetroFold

Features
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Pause social. Keep calls, texts and a bedside alarm. Need to stay reachable without getting pulled into a feed? RetroFold combines selected-app blocking with a retro phone keypad, clock and local alarm. Use your phone for what you need, then put it down. CHOOSE WHAT TO BLOCK Allow Apple Screen Time access, choose distracting social apps or websites, select a duration and start. Keep Phone and Messages out of your selection if you want to use them. Pick 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours or a custom duration. These are times for the same blocking feature, not separate modes. Shields lift at expiry, and you can end early. KEEP IMPORTANT PEOPLE CLOSE Use the retro keypad, system contact picker and Apple's message composer. To receive alerts only from chosen people, configure allowed people and callers separately in iPhone Focus. RetroFold does not read communications, judge their importance or switch iPhone Focus on or off. A BEDSIDE CLOCK, NOT ANOTHER FEED See a large clock and date. Schedule a local alarm with optional daily repeat. The alarm requires notification permission and follows Silent, Focus and other device settings; it does not behave identically to the built-in Clock alarm. A LITTLE RETRO CHARACTER Choose pink or white LCD styling, tap the keypad with sound and haptics, and keep a private note. A completed focus session earns an in-app letter card you can save or share. Letters are a bonus for any completed duration, not a 15-minute-only feature. No actual SMS is sent as a reward. YOUR PHONE, YOUR CHOICE Screen Time permission is required for app blocking. RetroFold does not replace iOS, the Home Screen, Phone, Messages or incoming-call screens. Phone and message actions finish in Apple system interfaces. iPhone Focus notification filtering must be turned off separately. No account, ads, analytics SDK, subscription or in-app purchase. App settings, notes and session records stay on your device. Sharing is optional and uses the destination you select. App interface languages: English and Korean.

About

Dotwave

Features
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์ŠคํŠธ๋ฆฌ๋ฐ์—๋Š” ์—†๋Š”, ๋‚ด ๋””์ง€ํ„ธ ์•จ๋ฒ” ์ปฌ๋ ‰์…˜ [์•จ๋ฒ” ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ด์–ด] - ํƒœ๊ทธ๋ฅผ ์ฝ์–ด ๊ฐ™์€ ์•จ๋ฒ”์˜ ๊ณก์„ ์ž๋™์œผ๋กœ ํ•œ ์žฅ์œผ๋กœ ๋ฌถ์–ด์š” - ์ปดํ•„๋ ˆ์ด์…˜ยทOST๋Š” ์—ฌ๋Ÿฌ ์•„ํ‹ฐ์ŠคํŠธ๊ฐ€ ์‹ค๋ ค๋„ ํ•œ ์žฅ์œผ๋กœ ์ธ์‹ํ•ด์š” - ์•จ๋ฒ”์„ ์–ด๋””๊นŒ์ง€ ๋“ค์—ˆ๋Š”์ง€ ๊ธฐ์–ตํ•˜๊ณ , ๋‹ค์Œ์— ์ด์–ด์„œ ๋“ค๋ ค์ค˜์š” - ๋งˆ์Œ์— ๋“œ๋Š” ์•จ๋ฒ”๊ณผ ๊ณก์— ํ•˜ํŠธ๋ฅผ ๋‚จ๊ฒจ ๋‘์„ธ์š” [๋Š๊น€ ์—†๋Š” ์žฌ์ƒ] - ๊ณก ์‚ฌ์ด์— ํ‹ˆ์ด ์—†๋Š” ๊ฐญ๋ฆฌ์Šค ์žฌ์ƒ(์•จ๋ฒ” ์ด์–ด๋“ฃ๊ธฐ ์„ค์ • ์‹œ) - ์…”ํ”Œยท์ „์ฒด ๋ฐ˜๋ณตยทํ•œ ๊ณก ๋ฐ˜๋ณต - ์ด์ „/๋‹ค์Œ ๋ฒ„ํŠผ์„ ๊ธธ๊ฒŒ ๋ˆ„๋ฅด๋ฉด 2๋ฐฐ์—์„œ 5๋ฐฐ๊นŒ์ง€ ์ ์  ๋นจ๋ผ์ง€๋Š” ํƒ์ƒ‰ - ํ™”๋ฉด์„ ๊บผ๋„, ์ž ๊ธˆํ™”๋ฉดยท์ œ์–ด์„ผํ„ฐยท์ด์–ดํฐ ๋ฒ„ํŠผ์œผ๋กœ ๊ทธ๋Œ€๋กœ ์กฐ์ž‘ [๋“ฃ๋Š” ๋ฐฉ์‹์„ ํ‘œ์‹œ] - ํŒŒ์ผ์˜ ์ƒ˜ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ดํŠธ์™€ ์‹ค์ œ ์ถœ๋ ฅ ์ƒ˜ํ”Œ๋ ˆ์ดํŠธ๋ฅผ ๋‚˜๋ž€ํžˆ ํ‘œ์‹œ - ์ด์–ดํฐยท๋ธ”๋ฃจํˆฌ์ŠคยทDAC ๋“ฑ iPhone์ด ์ฝ๋Š” ์ถœ๋ ฅ ์žฅ์น˜ ์ •๋ณด๋ฅผ ๊ทธ๋Œ€๋กœ ํ‘œ์‹œ - 5๋ฐด๋“œ ์ดํ€„๋ผ์ด์ €์™€ ํ”„๋ฆฌ์…‹, ๋ถ€์ŠคํŠธ์— ๋งž์ถ˜ ์ž๋™ ํ—ค๋“œ๋ฃธ [์ง€์› ์–ธ์–ด] - ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ดยทEnglishยทๆ—ฅๆœฌ่ชž

Screenshots

RetroFold4 screens
Dotwave4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: RetroFold at daily against Dotwave's every 2 days. RetroFold also leads on iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS

CostPrice ยท In-app purchases ยท Ads ยท Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

RetroFold ships an update daily, Dotwave every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on October 11, 2026 and October 20, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard2 real differences ยท 4 level
RetroFold versus Dotwave: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterRetroFoldDotwave
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyDaily โ€” betterEvery 2 days
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhoneiPhone
Requires iOS17.0 โ€” better26.0
Further details โ€” not scored
Size3 MB4 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperJeongyun HurHYEONSEONG HWANG

In-app purchases

None

RetroFold

No in-app purchases

None

Dotwave

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is RetroFold free?
RetroFold is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Dotwave free?
Dotwave is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do RetroFold or Dotwave have ads?
Neither RetroFold nor Dotwave shows ads.
Which is updated more often, RetroFold or Dotwave?
RetroFold ships an update daily, and Dotwave every 2 days. Most recently, RetroFold was updated on October 11, 2026 and Dotwave on October 20, 2026.

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