
“This One Still Works” by waneella.
Pixaki is the best pixel art app for iPad. It packs a whole load of features into a clean, modern interface, and it works great with Apple Pencil. So now you can make game sprites on the couch, animated backgrounds on your commute, or music videos in the park.
On the morning the courier put his device under his shirt and walked into the city, he had a repack that translated MoodX states into memory prompts. When the device read “Pale-Empty,” it would vibrate gently and show a five-second clip from his childhood—his grandmother’s hands making tea, the dog barking at 3 a.m.—images the courier hadn’t seen in years. The memories were blunt instruments: sometimes healing, sometimes cruel. After three days of lucid nostalgia he found himself waking at 2 a.m. reciting the cadence of his mother’s lullabies.
One night a woman named Mara arrived at his door with a MoodX still in its factory shell. “I need yours,” she said. Her voice had the calm flatness of someone who had learned to manage alarms. She explained she worked at an institution that collected mood data—aggregates for city planning, for emergency response. They’d noticed anomalies: neighborhoods where the average color line had begun to drift into a new spectrum, a slow resolve shifting overnight from Amber-Alert to Rose-Vivid. People were changing, and the data had stopped making sense.
The device was harmless enough at first: it measured temperature, humidity, skin conductivity, and nearby electromagnetic variance. But the app—MoodX—folded those inputs into a new vocabulary. A needle of color spun across a strip of the interface: Blue-Quiet, Amber-Alert, Rose-Vivid. It labeled states of being in short, sympathetic phrases: “Soothed,” “On Edge,” “Hungry for Truth.” It suggested simple acts: breathe for six; step outside; call Mara. thermometer 2025 moodx repack
By autumn 2025 MoodX itself issued an update. The company could have outlawed repacks entirely; instead they forked a limited open API and licensed a verified channel for third-party bundles under strict transparency rules. Corporate lawyers smiled; regulators nodded. The device that had once been a closed monolith was now a shared grammar with footnotes, and the market adapted.
The repack was what made the device dangerous. An aftermarket community—artists, hackers, and exiles—began to peel away MoodX’s polished surfaces and re-bundle the components with alternate firmware and new labels: repacks. Someone in Berlin grafted scent cartridges; a collective in Lagos made haptic skins that buzzed in sync with market hours; a poet in Kyoto rewired color cues to reference haiku seasons. Each repack was a small rebellion: a way to claim the machine’s diction for other languages and other truths. On the morning the courier put his device
He’d seen prototypes before—gadget evangelists and startup kids with bright eyes and brighter apps—but this one felt different. The metal was warm to the touch, as if it remembered a hand. When he tapped the face, a soft pulse of light traveled beneath the casing, and a low voice, filtered and calm, said: “Calibrating.”
Spring turned into an odd, synesthetic summer. The city smelled collectively of orange peel and vinegar one week—someone’s repack conditionally released scent when “Slightly Melancholic” crossed a threshold—and people adapted. Street art shifted to reflect the new palette: murals glowed in the colors the devices spat out. “Accept the weather” became “Accept the spectrum.” Retailers began offering discount hours when storefront repacks read “Rose-Vivid”; bars curated playlists to match the city’s prevailing hue. After three days of lucid nostalgia he found
They compromised. A small coalition formed—hackers, librarians, therapists, city planners—that would catalog repack signatures without seizing individuals’ devices. They published open schemas so repackers could declare what their builds did; those who refused were flagged and monitored for coordinated manipulation. It was imperfect. It required trust in a network of strangers who had learned to trade tenderness in repack wrappers.
Layers are now shared across the whole project, which means every layer has its own timeline. You can add as many layers and frames as your iPad can handle.

“Undertone” by waneella.
Use for background and foreground elements that are the same on every frame.
Composite layers using 18 different blend modes to create colour effects and adjustments.
Group and name layers. Use drag and drop to reorder layers and frames.
Preview your animations by sliding the timeline to see the canvas update instantly.
Preview up to ten frames, and choose from three different colour tint modes.
Select multiple layers or frames at once to quickly make bulk adjustments.
Pixaki’s reference layers allow you to import any image from your photo library or Files at full resolution, resize and reposition it on the canvas, then draw pixels over the top. You can have as many reference layers per project as you like. Adjust the opacity to draw underneath the image if you prefer.

“Yeti House” by Genuine Human Art.
Whether you’re working with a palette of 16 colours or 16 million, Pixaki gives you everything you need to pick and modify the colours for your art.
The colour panel has four different modes for chosing the exact colour your want: a square picker with an infinitely scrolling hue slider, sliders for HSB and RGB, hex code input, and the project palette.

“Distorted” by waneella.
Sample any colour from the canvas, optionally including reference images.
Quickly fill large areas of the same colour. The fill can be contiguous or discontiguous.
Change all instances of any colour on the current cel, layer, or the whole project.
Selection is vastly improved in Pixaki 4, with new powerful tools and capabilities that rival any other image editor.

“Kiki & Jiji” by Chelsea Faust.
Works as both a lasso and a polygonal lasso, allowing you to select any shape possible.
Use to select rectangluar areas. It’s simple, but sometimes simple is best.
Quickly selection regions of the same colour, either contiguous or discontiguous.
You can add and subtract selections, as well as scale, stretch, and reposition them.
Keep the selection active, and all painting will be masked to the selected area.
Cut or copy the selected pixels and paste them to any app that supports pasting images.
Move and manipulate anything on your canvas; selected pixels, pasted images, or the whole layer.

“Skesis Castle” by rachels_ham.
Move without needing to select. Position the image on or off the canvas without clipping.
Scale from the corners to keep the aspect ratio, or from the sides to squash and stretch.
Rotate by any angle or in 90º increments, and flip horizontally and vertically.
Whether you want to add finishing touches in After Effects, or continue working on your Photoshop projects on the move, Pixaki plays really well with other software. You can also use magnification when sharing to social media without the results looking blurry.
Export the current frame or all frames as individual images. Import just about any image.
Export your animation as a GIF or animated PNG. Importing GIFs is also supported.
Output your animation as a QuickTime movie with a range of codec options.
Perfect for use in your game, with a configurable number of columns.
Move between Pixaki and the popular desktop pixel art app, maintaining layers and cels.*
Import and export layered PSDs. The layers for each frame are put into groups.
Pixaki takes full advantage of iPad hardware and software to deliver something fast, powerful, and intuitive that feels at home on your iPad.
Full support lets you store your projects in the cloud and even collaborate with others.
Create canvases up to 2 megapixels, meaning you can work in full HD 1080p.
All the heavy lifting is done with the full power of the iPad’s graphics cores using Metal.
Manage your projects from the Files app and open them in Pixaki with a single tap.
Split view multitasking support is great for viewing tutorials and references while creating.
The most natural way to draw pixel art. Supports double tap gestures on the Apple Pencil 2.
Hi, I’m Luke and I’m the solo developer behind Pixaki. If you need any help with the app, if you come across bugs, or if you have any feature suggestions, please get in touch — I aim to respond within a couple of working days or sooner.
If you’ve made something cool in Pixaki or just want to chat about pixel art, I’d also love to hear from you.
Mention or message @pixaki@mastodon.social for support or to show off your art. Follow for inspiration.
Pixaki comes in two versions; Intro, which is completely free, and Pro.
Great for anyone starting out with pixel art. Completely free with no time limits or ads.
3 layers, plus 1 reference layer.
8 frames of animation.
160 × 160 px maximum canvas size.
Basic import and export formats.
Perfect for professional artists and game creators. Create pixel art without restrictions.
Unlimited layers and references.
Unlimited animation frames.
Up to 2 megapixel canvas size.
Advanced import and export, including Aseprite* and Photoshop PSD.
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