Blear vs PIXEL86
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Blear
Create unique blurry wallpapers from your own photos or pre-loaded images. Easily adjust blurriness and crop to personalize your device's home and lock screens. Share your creations directly from the app.
- Transform photos into blurry wallpapers
- Adjust crop and blurriness
- Use pre-loaded images
- Action Extension for quick editing
- Save and set as wallpaper
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Transform your photos into stunning blurry wallpapers. Make your Home/Lock screen shine! Drag the image horizontally to change the crop. You get the best result with bright colorful photos, like a handful of jellybeans or unicorns. The app comes bundled with some beautiful photos to get you started. Just shake to get another one. When you have swiped your preferred blurriness, tap the save button on the right. In the Photos app, go to the image you just saved, tap the action button, and choose “Use as Wallpaper”. The app also comes with an Action Extension. So instead of opening the app, you can start by finding a photo in the Photos app, tap the action button, and then choose “Make Blurry Wallpaper”. Blear is open source: https://github.com/sindresorhus/blear
PIXEL86
Transform photos and videos with vintage pixel art aesthetics. Apply true black-and-white dithering, custom color palettes, and unique dithering styles to create retro media. Supports video editing and sharing your creations.
- True B/W dithering
- Video editing support
- Customizable color palettes
- Three dithering styles (Natural, Pattern, Flat)
- Vintage-inspired aesthetics
- Social media sharing
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PIXEL86 — Retro Dithering for Photos & Videos Make your media look like it came from a cooler, glitchier timeline. Bring back the charm of vintage tech with PIXEL86, the ultimate tool to transform your photos and videos into pixel-perfect black-and-white or limited-palette art. Inspired by early computer graphics, old-school printers, and classic GIFs — this is retro done right. True B/W Dithering No grays. Just black or white pixels smartly arranged to simulate shadows and depth — exactly how early screens did it. Now Supports Video Editing Apply your favorite dithering style to video clips. Make every frame look like a piece of pixel-art history. Color Palettes, Reimagined Choose from curated vintage-inspired palettes Hit random for a fresh surprise every time Or build your own custom palette for a personalized look Three Dithering Styles Natural — Smooth, classic error diffusion. Clean and expressive. Pattern — Retro dot-matrix vibes. Adjustable matrix for custom textures. Flat — Not technically dithering, but perfect for dramatic, posterized effects in both stills and motion. Share Your Style Use #pixel86 on social and tag @pixel86app on Instagram — we love featuring the coolest creations from the community.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Blear at none against PIXEL86's 2. Blear also leads on ads (none vs shown). PIXEL86's advantage is update cadence (every 5 days vs every 3 months) and review sentiment (100% vs 87%). On price, rating, ratings volume and device support 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. PIXEL86 sells 2 one-off in-app purchases. Blear asks for nothing beyond the download.
Blear holds the better App Store score, 4.8 against 4.6. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 77 and 42 respectively. Written reviews complicate that: 87% of Blear's written reviews are positive against 100% of PIXEL86's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Blear ships an update every 3 months, PIXEL86 every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on November 1, 2026 and November 3, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Blear | PIXEL86 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (77 ratings) — better | 4.6 (42 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 86.7% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 77 — better | 42 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 months | Every 5 days — better |
| Ads | No — better | Yes |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free — better | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 18.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 13 MB | 87 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Sindre Sorhus | Peter Tretyakov |
Customer experience
Blear
PIXEL86
In-app purchases
Blear
No in-app purchases
PIXEL86
- License Discount$9.99
- Perpetual License$19.99









