UniChar vs DevInstant
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
UniChar
Easily find and type special characters with a powerful Unicode keyboard. Browse hundreds of thousands of symbols, search by name or drawing, and organize your favorites. Ideal for developers and anyone needing to use a wide range of text symbols.
- Access hundreds of thousands of Unicode characters
- Custom keyboard for typing special symbols in any app
- Search characters by name, info, or drawing
- Organize favorite characters
- View character name, Unicode, and UTF-8 info
- Browse curated categories and full Unicode table
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UniChar is a powerful yet beautiful Unicode character app and keyboard that allows you to quickly find, type, and work with special symbols. ◣ "This iOS keyboard app will give you all the Unicode characters you’ll ever need." – lifehacker “UniChar is a cool little app and keyboard, and offers access to a huge world of Unicode characters that are otherwise absent within the standard iOS keyboard.” – iDownloadBlog "On the Mac, you can type any character [with] the Emoji & Symbols viewer ... The selection on iOS is much more limited ... But UniChar changes that." – Cult of Mac “It’s a full-featured utility for searching and copying symbols … it’s always nice to see a developer who’s dedicated to improving this kind of utility over time and adopting new features … it's a very handy app.” – AppStories ◤ Utilize hundreds of thousands of characters organized neatly into categories and a full Unicode table. You can quickly search for the character you’re looking for, type special symbols in any app with the custom keyboard, and collect your favorite characters to access them even quicker. For developers, UniChar is an efficient tool to work with Unicode code points and UTF-8 encodings. Revamp your workflow by using UniChar alongside other apps on iPad, or use Universal Clipboard to copy on your iPhone and paste on your Mac. App ◉ Work with characters and their info – Name, Unicode, and UTF-8 ◉ Browse curated categories in grid or list view ◉ Customize your categories – choose from more than 150 symbol and script categories* ◉ Access the entire Unicode table by character blocks* ◉ Go to a specific block, category, or code point ◉ Search for symbols by name, info, or even by drawing** ◉ Identify characters and see a breakdown of code points that form them ◉ Ask Siri questions about a Unicode character ◉ Select custom fonts to use when rendering glyphs ◉ Collect and organize your favorite symbols ◉ Quickly copy character info to the clipboard ◉ Insert characters into the text field and compose text using the system keyboard ◉ Share your text via Messages, Mail, Mastodon, etc – or open it in other apps like Pages Keyboard ◎ Type special symbols in any app ◎ Quickly input your favorite and recently used characters ◎ Browse curated categories – choose from more than 150 categories* ◎ Designed to compliment the Emoji keyboard Widgets ■ Add your favorite symbol to your Lock Screen ■ View stats for how many drawings you've submitted to help improve Search by Drawing Apple Watch ◆ Add your favorite symbol to your watch face ◆ Quickly access your favorite and recently used characters ◆ Copy character info to your iPhone’s clipboard And More ● Beautiful Liquid Glass design ● Light and dark mode ● Full accessibility support ● Handoff ● Drag and Drop ● Keyboard shortcuts and menu bar on iPad ● Universal app for iPhone, iPad, and Apple silicon Mac ● No ads, no tracking, no subscriptions * All Categories can be unlocked via a one-time in-app purchase. ** Search by Drawing is powered by an on-device machine learning model that predicts matching symbols as you draw in real-time. You can help improve symbol recognition by submitting your own drawings!
DevInstant
This utility app helps designers and developers quickly find color themes, symbols, icons, and characters. It offers features like color picking from images, Unicode character lookup, and code generation for design elements. It also includes unit conversion and device information.
- Color theme finder
- Symbol and icon library
- Unicode character lookup
- Code generation
- Unit conversion
- Image filters
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Welcome to DEVInstant, it is an easy&quick tool for designers and developers, support quickly find color themes, symbols, icons, character, views&controls and others, to help you get the information about these items. Help you easy to find design inspiration, improve the efficiency of development and creation. - About Color: System colors of ios and osx, light or dark mode. Many color cards and gradient themes. HTML5 standard colors and Web safe colors. Find color with Color palette, Effect previews. Picker color from image. - About Symbol: ios and osx system symbols & images. Unicode symbol characters. Emoji symbols. SF Symbols. - About Character: Unicode Character Encyclopedia. HTML5 entity character table. System FontStyle viewing. - Code generation: Copy the value, name, code of the color, character or symbol to clipboard. - Quick Searching: Searching with keywords and values. - Views&Controls: Explore the appearance of various types of views and controls in iOS. - Image Filters: CoreImage's Image Filters browsing, viewing features. - Others: Apple devices information and resolution query. Unit conversion features, support length, area, volume, pressure, mass, energy..., 19 kinds. Accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope data display MD5, SHA, BASE64 encoder
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: UniChar at 4.7 against DevInstant's 4.0. UniChar also leads on ratings volume (1.6K vs 4). DevInstant's advantage is review sentiment (100% vs 79%) and update cadence (monthly vs every 2 months). On price, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model 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. UniChar sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and DevInstant sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $1.99 per year. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
UniChar holds the better App Store score, 4.7 against 4.0. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: UniChar has 1.6K ratings behind it against 4, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 79% of UniChar's written reviews are positive against 100% of DevInstant's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
UniChar ships an update every 2 months, DevInstant monthly. The most recent releases landed on October 14, 2026 and October 6, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | UniChar | DevInstant |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.7 (1.6K ratings) — better | 4.0 (4 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 78.8% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 1.6K — better | 4 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | Monthly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 16 MB | 24 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Jordan Hipwell | 苏斌 牟 |
Customer experience
UniChar
DevInstant
Bugs and requests
UniChar
Reported bugs
3 issues- Keyboard disappearing from settings
- Drawing search feature not working
- Certain characters not rendering properly
Requested features
5 requests- Add search by name/code in app
- Allow multi-selection of characters
- Sync favorites across devices
- Expand character coverage (e.g. Greek, Alchemical)
- Provide font options to display more symbols
DevInstant
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
UniChar
- All Categories$9.99
DevInstant
- Yearly Subscription$1.991 Year
- Official Version$5.99







