Support

Everything below is read out of the shipping build — the counts, the formats and the prices are the real numbers. If your question isn’t answered here, write to support@n1apps.com and a person will answer.

What the app actually does

1-Bit Wonder is a live retro camera. The effect is not applied after you shoot — it runs inside the viewfinder as a Metal shader chain at full frame rate, and the photo or video you save is the same image you were looking at. There is no render queue, no export progress bar on capture, and no “original” hiding underneath. What you see is what you get, and that is the whole point.

Getting around the viewfinder

Nearly everything is a gesture on the preview itself. There is no menu to hunt through.

The rest is buttons: the gear at the top left opens Settings, the bolt at the top right toggles the torch, the photo icon at the bottom left pulls in something you already shot, and the icon at the bottom right flips the camera if you would rather tap than double-tap.

The intensity slider sits directly above the lens strip and only appears when a lens is actually selected. It scales the whole look from barely-there to full strength. If you have picked ORIGINAL, there is nothing to scale, so the slider is hidden.

The lenses

There are 82 lenses, grouped into nine families, plus ORIGINAL — the untouched camera — and YOURS, which holds the looks you make yourself.

The family called ??? is not a bug. It is named that on purpose. Those eight are the experimental lenses, and telling you what they are in advance spoils them. Swipe in and find out.

Making your own lens

Three buttons on the right edge of the viewfinder, and everything they make is real — the same engine the built-in lenses run on, not a filter stacked on top.

• The dice rolls an entirely new look. Modules are drawn from across the whole catalogue — dither screens, glow fields, tubes, tape, pixel-sort, prism — and assembled from in-range building blocks, so a roll is novel but never broken;
• Holding the dice remixes instead: it keeps the spine of the look you are on and swaps one module at the tail. Use this when a roll is nearly right;
• The palette button re-rolls just the colours and leaves the structure alone.

The moment you roll or remix something, a save button appears above those tools. Tap it, name the look, and it lands in YOURS — the app jumps you straight to it in the lens strip. Delete one from the strip whenever you like.

An unsaved roll is not kept. If you swipe away to another lens without saving, that look is gone, and the seed that made it will not come back. Save first, swipe second.

Saved lenses live in the app’s own storage on your device. There is no cloud copy, so deleting the app deletes them — see below.

Photos and video

Photosare written as HEIC at the sensor’s full capture resolution, with the effect already baked in.

Video is H.264 in an MP4 container, 1080p, at a 12 Mbps target bitrate, with AAC audio at 44.1 kHz. Recording is not time-limited. A timer runs above the shutter while you record. The file is ready the instant you stop — again, because the effect was already applied to every frame as it arrived, there is nothing left to process. That is why it is fast, and it is why a clip is ready to post straight away.

Both go to your normal iOS photo library, into your camera roll, using add-only access — the app can put files in and cannot read what is already there.

Using a photo or video you already have

The photo icon at the bottom left of the viewfinder opens the system picker. Pick an image or a clip, and the lens you are currently on is rendered onto it — the same shader chain, same intensity slider, same look. Export when you are happy with it.

This uses Apple’s own picker, which hands the app exactly the one item you chose and nothing else. It does not need library access and will not ask for it.

Membership

1-Bit Wonder is paid. There is no ad-supported tier and no partial free mode — the lens library and the creator are what the app is, and they are behind the membership.

Prices are US dollars; the App Store shows your own currency and local tax on the plan card before you confirm. All three unlock the same thing — every lens, the creator, and whatever gets added later.

The free trial, and how to not get charged

The yearly plan opens with 3 days free. It converts to a paid year automatically unless you cancel, and Apple’s rule is that a cancellation has to land at least 24 hours before the trial ends to stop the charge. Cancelling does not cut you off early — you keep access until the period you have paid for runs out.

Cancelling

Subscriptions are billed by Apple, not by us, so they are cancelled in your Apple Account and nowhere else. Settings inside the app has a Manage Subscription link that takes you straight there, or go to apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions yourself. Deleting the app does not cancel anything.

Lifetime is a one-time purchase. There is nothing to cancel and it will never bill you again.

Restoring a purchase

New phone, restored device, or reinstall: open Settings inside the app and tap Restore Purchases. The paywall has the same button. It asks the App Store for the entitlements on the Apple Account currently signed in on the device.

If it says “No previous purchase found on this Apple Account”, that message is literal, and it is nearly always the same cause: the device is signed in to a different Apple Account than the one that paid. Purchases belong to an Apple Account, not to a phone and not to an email address you typed anywhere. Check Settings → your name → Media & Purchases, then try again. Family Sharing, if it is on for the purchase, also has to be enabled on the account that bought it.

Refunds

We never see your payment and cannot issue a refund — Apple is the merchant on every transaction. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com. Apple decides, and it is worth writing a real sentence about what went wrong. If something in the app was broken for you, tell us too — we would rather fix it.

Permissions

The app asks for three things, each only when it needs it.

The photo permission is add-only: it lets the app put finished shots into your camera roll and gives it no ability to read, browse or scan what is already in there. Picking an existing photo goes through Apple’s picker instead, which needs no permission at all.

The app does not ask for location, contacts, health data or tracking permission, and does not read your advertising identifier.

Are my photos uploaded anywhere?

No.There is no server, no account, no sign-in, no cloud sync, no analytics and no third-party SDK. Every effect is computed on your device’s GPU. Your photos, your videos and your saved lenses exist only on the device and in whatever you chose to save to your own camera roll.

The only network traffic the app is capable of is Apple’s own StoreKit, checking whether your membership is valid. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Something’s broken

The paywall spins, or shows no plans. The plan cards are fetched from the App Store, so this is a connection problem far more often than an app problem. There is a retry on that screen — tap it once you are back on a solid connection. If it persists on good Wi-Fi, write in.

“Your purchase is pending approval.” You are on a managed account with Ask to Buy, or your bank asked for a confirmation step. Nothing is wrong. When the approval lands the app unlocks itself — you do not have to buy again, and buying again is exactly what you should not do.

“Your purchase couldn’t be verified.” The receipt failed StoreKit’s signature check. Tap Restore first. If you were charged and Restore does not open it, email us with the date of the charge.

Restore finds nothing. See the restore section above — check which Apple Account the device is signed in to.

“Camera access is off.” The permission was declined at some point. The screen has an Open Settings button that takes you to the exact switch. iOS only ever asks once, which is why this needs a trip to Settings rather than another prompt.

Selfies come out mirrored — or not mirrored. Settings → Mirror Selfies. It flips the front camera horizontally in the viewfinder and in what you save, so the preview and the file always agree. Which way round is right is a matter of taste; both are one toggle away.

The video has no sound.Microphone access was declined. Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone → 1-Bit Wonder. Existing silent clips cannot be fixed after the fact.

Nothing saved to my camera roll.Photo access was declined. Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos → 1-Bit Wonder, and allow adding. The app only ever asks for add-only access.

The preview stutters, or the phone gets warm.Every lens is a live GPU chain and some are far heavier than others — the experimental family in particular. Older devices will drop frames on the heaviest looks. Lowering the intensity slider genuinely reduces the work, and lighter families like B&W and FILM cost much less than the glow and glitch chains.

A lens I made is gone. Saved lenses are read back one at a time on purpose, so a single unreadable entry cannot wipe the rest — but that also means one bad entry drops silently instead of taking your whole library with it. The rest of YOURS should be intact.

Deleting the app

Deleting the app removes every lens you made and every setting, and iOS deletes the app’s container with it. None of it exists anywhere else, so there is nothing to restore and no backup to pull from.

Photos and videos you already saved to your camera roll are not touched — those are yours, in the Photos app, and they stay.

Your membership survives, because it belongs to your Apple Account, not to the install. Reinstall and tap Restore Purchases. And to say it once more: deleting the app does not cancel a subscription.

What it runs on

iPhone, iOS 17.0 or later. Portrait only — the viewfinder is built around one orientation and does not rotate. It will install and run on an iPad in iPhone compatibility mode, but the iPad is not what it was designed or tuned for.

The interface ships in English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Thai, and follows your device language.

Contact a human

One address, the same one used for privacy questions. It reaches a person, not a ticket queue.

Email: support@n1apps.com

Tell us which iPhone and which iOS version, which lens you were on, and what happened. Screenshots and screen recordings help more than anything else — with a live camera effect, seeing it is usually the whole diagnosis. 1-Bit Wonder is made by one person, so replies are not instant, but every message is read.