The Complete List of iOS Glitch Apps

Over the past 5 years, I’ve downloaded and experimented with thousands of iPhone photo apps while working on my Daily Appsperiment and Impossible Glitch series. Since I most often get asked about glitch apps, I decided to compile this list of glitch apps for your iPhonehole. I’ll be updating this list as often as I can, so let me know if I missed anything:

Note: I’ve now created a second list dedicated to glitch video apps.

The Complete List of iOS Glitch Apps

Glitch Lab Pro (or free) – A very powerful glitch editor with lots of control. One of GL’s most handy features is the ability to rotate an image, which is handy since most glitch effects tend to destroy data in a top-to-bottom manner. For a glitch “vignette“, I like to glitch the image near the bottom, rotate and glitch again, then keep repeating. Tip: To set your quality to “high”, tap the three arrows on the right, then swipe the advanced options to the left two times to find the “options” setting.

Decim8 – The go to app for photo destruction. Though you can create lots of cool combinations of effects, there’s no fine tune controlling for effect your images. See if you can guess which two effects I helped out with. Tip: In settings, I like to turn off Post-FX color warp. That makes it easier to come along later and mix/edit with the original image in Filterstorm.

Databender – The only app for data moshing video! Though it’s full of other features for still photos, I honestly have to say I only use this for it’s awesome video glitches. Tip: These compression errors often look totally different when mashed together with other footage in iMovie. What appears as a solid green area in the preview may actually end up as a weird transparency when saved with other clips.

Glitché – Sort of like Decim8, Glitché feels like more of a glitch filter than an editor, but it’s effects are still worth checking out. What really makes this app shine is it’s ability to save glitch’d images as GIF’s, though I’m not sure if that’s included with the free version, full version, or “pro” version.

Glitch Cam– Glitch Cam is a free version of Camera Filters from Glitché that costs $2.99 and allows to create unlimited long videos.

Omohide Breaker – A pretty straightforward app with a few nice touches. Swiping in different directions gives you the ability to apply different glitch style effects, while the slider at the bottom gives you some control on the amount of each effect. I love being able to swipe left for a PNG style break or right for a GIF style effect (just the effect, not actually animated). Tip: I always recommend setting your default image size to “raw”.

Satromizer – The 1st iPhone glitch app! 2009, yo! Tap on your photo and watch everything glitch. Prone to crashes and hasn’t been updated in a looong time. These guys had some cool ideas though, so I always hope they’ll come back to tweak it more.

GLTCH – Works on still images or on GIFs, which is kind of cool. You can pull GIFs from your roll, or random ones from Tumblr. Tip: Sometimes it seems like the effects on GIFs aren’t working, it’s just taking time. Wait it out and the GIF will update with the effect. (a loading wheel would be nice)

Glitch.Simply – A simple glitch app. Tap the button and it glitches the image. Ad driven, free, not much else to say.

iGlitch – I opened this app up after some bad experiences and it all seems to be fixed. Takes a little digging, but the RGB panels, layering, and feedback options make this stand out from most of the other glitch apps out there.

Swutits – The only iPad only glitch app. Doesn’t seem to need the extra space or processing power, but it’s nice to see folks thinking about using the extra space. Sort of straightforward, set your variables and watch it glitch.

PixiVisor – Debated whether or not to include this, but decided it was too awesome of an idea to miss. Rather than being a straightforward tap-here-and-glitch app, PV converts your image into audio data, which you then capture and convert on another iOS app. The results are marvelously glitchy and it works great for visualists. Tip: If you are making a music video or something, try playing just the kick drum tracks loudly as you are transferring your audio-images… this extra noise will give your image a sort of visual punch to go along with the music.

iColorama S– Though this is mostly an app for adding various filters to photos, they do have a glitch section in there too. It looks mostly like it’s using glitch textures and applying them ontop of an image, but still worth listing. Tip: Load a photo, click effects, then click “glitch”, then change the “set” and “preset” buttons on the lower right to create your effect. Took me forever to figure that flow out.

Text2Image – Rather than glitching your existing photos, this app  actually lets you create glitch art from scratch by entering any text you like. The results are cool repeating glitch patterns. These images could combined with apps like Image Blender or Layrs, to create new types of glitch art.

Glitch Wizard – Glitch Wizard has a great selection of glitches you can apply, including a suite of “audio glitches” that are similar to this technique using Audacity. One of the coolest parts of GW is that it allows you to animate your glitches and export as video or GIFs.

Glitchr – Pretty straightforward app that allows you to cycle through a series of jpeg style glitches on your image.

Glitchee – Lots of sliders and things, which is nice because I like to feel like I have a little bit of control over my errors. No crashes and easy to use UI.

Anti Tagging – Anonymizes photos by auto-detecting faces and glitching them out. A cute little one trick app.

Glitch (aka Glitch4ios)- Choose your glitch effect and apply. Has a few nice features, including the ability to rotate an image (which is a way more useful feature than it sounds) and variable controls for effects. Don’t forget to switch to high-res images in the settings.

Bent Camera– This is a live camera app, no importing currently, that allows you fragment and glitch out the world into colorful mosaics or images that appear to warp time. The looping and video effects are great for short glitch videos. Bonus points for using a circuit bending reference in the title. I don’t imagine myself using the mirroring effects too much, but there are some really RGB and pixel shifting effects in here.