There's endless hype around generative ai this year, and app developers have clearly been paying attention. ai-Centric Tools Are Exploding Apple App Store Charts in almost every category, occupying the top 10 positions in education, productivity and photo editing. Opportunities especially abound for free design and graphics apps, a category that is positively saturated with ai content creation tools.
But quantity doesn't mean quality, and many of these apps are surprisingly bad. I've been using some of the most popular offerings to understand the state of ai tools as we approach 2025. And for every serious attempt to make ai useful, there seem to be several more designed to cash in on expectations. – The silent paywall features that advertise behind expensive subscriptions and greatly misrepresent the results that users can achieve, if the app works at all.
About half of the app stores The 10 best graphics and design applications. They have “ai” in the name, and three of them are made by the same company: ARMSan app developer founded in 2022 and based in Türkiye. One of its applications, <a target="_blank" href="https://davinci.ai/”>DaVinci aiIt is advertised as an ai image generator with some photo editing features. Almost all of the tools are locked behind a $30 annual subscription fee (or $5 weekly), and the free trial only unlocks a poor text-to-image feature that lets you choose between using unspecified versions of Stable Diffusion and models. DALL-E ai.
The images it produces are of low quality and are incorrectly resized or cropped. In-app ads appear when you click on virtually any link. The user interface is unpleasant to navigate. If you do pay for the full version, you can't download any edited image without putting an ugly watermark on it. And yet it sits head and shoulders above the rankings of more recognizable creative platforms like Microsoft Designer, which has its own built-in text-to-image ai generator. Adobe Express is the only design-focused app in the same category that currently ranks above DaVinci ai.
The other two high-end HUBX products I tested were equally mediocre: the <a target="_blank" href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/home-ai–ai-interior-design/id6464476667″>Home ai The “interior design” app spits out hallucinatory images of rooms that are barely usable even as conceptual plans, and the <a target="_blank" href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tattoo-ai-tattoo-design/id6479689893″>ai Tattoo The app refused to work completely. Both apps have the same paywall features and review pop-up reminders as DaVinci ai. The copy-pasted version history notes from the App Store across all HUBX products also contain no details.
While all three apps boast a surprisingly large number of five-star reviews, the User comments on social networks. and the <a target="_blank" href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/davinci-ai-image-generator/id1630366866?see-all=reviews”>App Store Feedback It is overwhelmingly negative. A recurring complaint is that it is impossible to contact customer service. HUBX never responded to my requests for comment.
Apps that clearly advertise that they have artificial intelligence features are very attractive. According Sensor towerfour of the 10 most downloaded iOS design and graphics apps in the US so far this year have “ai” somewhere in their title. That's actually two fewer than last year, but the most popular apps are booming. photo room Downloads are up more than 160 percent since last year. Relatively, Photoshop Express Downloads on iOS, which also include generative ai features, fell 21 percent during the same period.
ai-Centric Creative Apps Are Not all bad, but saturation of the app market makes it harder to find good apps that use the technology more specifically. Apps like Google's Magic Editor and Adobe Photoshop have specific tools for removing unwanted objects from photos or inserting new ones in specific places. Smaller developers that offer similar features and perform those tasks well are also rising in the App Store rankings.
For example, Photoroom and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.picsart.ai/”>Picsart ai (all-in-one graphic design apps similar to platforms like Canva and Adobe Express) are actually pretty good! They occupy a prominent place in the free App Store Category “Photo & Video” and provides a similar range of features to quickly create online content using pre-designed templates and digital assets, along with some ai-powered editing tools such as automatic background and object removal.
Neither app wowed me, but they did exactly what they advertised: the background removal features aren't as good as Canva's, but they got the job done, and object removal erased undesirable aspects of photos even if it wasn't as convincing as that of Google. Magic editor. Both apps lock some of their premium editing features and digital assets behind a $13 monthly subscription, which is pretty standard if you're honest – individual subscriptions to Canva and Adobe Express start at $15 and $10 per month, respectively, for comparison. .
There's also a notable split between the iPhone and iPad charts, with very few ai-focused names appearing in the top 100 free. either paid list for iPad, which instead features a more diverse range of graphic design apps such as Adobe Fresco, Clip Studio Paint and Canva. And curiously, the list of the best paid The iPhone apps look very similar. There are a host of 3D drawing and modeling platforms, premium reference materials for artists, and tools that streamline specific creative tasks, such as removing backgrounds and resizing images.
The split suggests that the spam ai app phenomenon is a mass market one that hasn't caught on among traditional photographers and illustrators who still want to use their tried-and-true apps. It also suggests that ai itself has less appeal if users are expected to pay for it, which coincides with the type of creative ai applications appearing most frequently (custom tattoos, logo makers, and interior design), which are specialized services that generally require payment. . People don't necessarily want to eliminate the skills barrier; They want to remove the financial.
Using in-app charges to appear in the free category of the App Store, and therefore attract a broader audience, is nothing new. Mobile games have been taking advantage of this loophole for years, and what's happening now with the creative ai market seems eerily familiar.
