Better Camera
Manual iPhone camera. No AI. What you see is what you get.
37 followers
Manual iPhone camera. No AI. What you see is what you get.
37 followers
Better Camera is a manual photography app for iPhone. Manual ISO, shutter, focus, and white balance, plus 10 film simulations with real grain rendered through a Metal shader. No AI processing, no Smart HDR, no scene detection — what you see in the viewfinder is what you get in the photo. Built solo because the stock Camera over-processes and pro apps felt like full cockpits. HEIF, JPEG, lossless TIFF output. iPhone Camera Control + hardware shutter support.
Hey Hunters, David here.
Better Camera is a manual photography app for iPhone. No AI processing. What you see in the viewfinder is what you get in the photo.
I built it because every iPhone update made the stock Camera "smarter" — scene detection, Smart HDR, AI denoise — and the photos started looking less like what I actually saw. Halide and ProCamera exist for pros, but they felt like full cockpits when I just wanted a few essential controls.
So Better Camera sits in the middle: manual ISO, shutter speed, focus, and white balance. 10 film simulations with real grain rendered through a Metal compute shader. HEIF, JPEG, and lossless TIFF output. iPhone Camera Control + hardware shutter support.
A few things that took the longest to get right:
- Building my own ISO Priority and Shutter Priority modes (iPhone doesn't expose these natively)
- A grain shader that's actually monochromatic per-pixel like real film, not the channel-noise that most "film filters" do
- Settings that persist between sessions, so opening the app is one tap from shooting
I shot it for a month across Japan and used almost nothing else – the screenshots and sample photos in the gallery are all from the app, no edits.
Built solo as a 20-year designer + indie iOS developer. Better Camera is by Heygor, my one-person studio.
Launch pricing for Lifetime is $39.99 until June 7, then $59.99. Yearly is $19.99/year with a 7-day trial.
Happy to answer anything – technical, design, business, why no Android (yet?). I'm in Tokyo timezone so replies might be staggered, but I'll get to every comment.
📷 bettercamera.app
every iphone update makes photos look less like what I actually saw and more like what apple thinks I wanted. a camera app that just lets you shoot without all the processing sounds refreshing. the film simulations look really good too
Thank you, @tina_chhabra,
Once, I saw a person taking screenshots with the Apple Camera.
She explained that this is the only way to keep the photo unprocessed on the iPhone. My very first inside.
Narrative BI
Been waiting for someone to make a camera app that doesn't try to "fix" my photos for me.
Congrats on the launch!
I appreciate your support, @mamkindesigner,
It's in the air, I only want to see myself in my photos. Not randomly generated slop.
Love the idea, I'm still baffled that phone makers think we want AI upscaling on every photo we take. I just want to capture the real moment as it was!
Update: PetaPixel just covered Better Camera 🎉 https://petapixel.com/2026/06/01/photographer-builds-the-iphone-camera-app-he-always-wanted/
Subscription Day
When I saw Japan and a UI like this, I couldn’t resist giving it a like. Good luck with the launch! 🚀
@dmitriychuta thank you! Btw, used your https://awesomepost.app to make the demo, waiting for the public release 🙌