Wallpaper isn’t the most important part of your phone, but it’s something most of us put at least a little thought into. I’ve looked for wallpaper apps and websites in the past, and most of them have been junky, shady, or both.
Wallaroo is a new app from The Icon Factory — makers of Twitterrific, xScope, and more — with no ads, no junk, no predatory subscription pricing. Two bucks a month or twenty bucks a year gets you access to tons of high-quality wallpapers without the garbage and with a big “Data Not Collected” App Privacy card.
Yesterday I became aware of the awkwardly named “The OG App” (🙄), which promises “the OG Instagram experience”: “With the OG app, you can easily filter what you see in your Instagram feed, create custom feeds, remove reels, ads, suggested content, and more!” It seemed impossible, and that’s because it is.
I nearly gave the app access to my Instagram account, believing for a moment that maybe, given its presence in the App Store at all, it had been properly vetted; but because of their suspiciously slow homepage, as well as the company’s bizarre name (“Un1feed”) and the dearth of info about it, I decided to wait. I’m glad I did.
Hey, the Podcasts app now (in iOS 16) has 1.75× playback speed. (Included speeds are 0.75×, 1×, 1.25×, 1.5×, 1.75×, and 2×; 1.25× was added in iOS 15.)
Pinboard has been, as far as I know, the de facto online bookmarking tool for nearly a whole decade, which is why I’ve been baffled at how the Pinboard app marketplace has languished for so long. The two frontrunners — Pinner and Pushpin — were last updated 4 years ago and 1 year ago, respectively, and Pushpin has always been slow and unstable for me. Both seemed to have stalled on maintenance and the addition of any new features. I started to assume Pinboard was just too niche of a tool to warrant any serious app development, and that people had maybe just just moved on to a combination of Pocket and Chrome bookmarks.
Every few months, though, my frustration with Pushpin would lead me to search the App Store for alternatives, and finally this weekend I got some! They are both already huge improvements over their predecessors, have both iOS and macOS versions, and for all the tech blogs I read, I hadn’t heard anything about them.
Pinstachio (App Store) by Francisco Cantu is fast and capable, and feels very at-home on both iOS and macOS. Its feature set is relatively limited, and it charges a subscription fee (though an extremely modest one at $7 per year) rather than a one-time purchase, but it’s definitely one to try out and keep an eye on.
Pins for Pinboard (App Store, Twitter) (not to be confused with Pins for Pinboard.in) is by Quang Anh Do, maker of the (now-defunct?) Writing Kit. With clever, unique features — like browsing by domain, “On This Day,” “Random 20” — tag and metadata suggestions, preview images, a development blog and Twitter, and a one-time purchase price, Pins looks like the clear winner to me.
Here’s a quick comparison table:
Pinstachio
Pins for Pinboard
Mac app
Yes
Yes
Suggested tags / metadata
No
Yes
Preview images
Only on detail view
Yes
Token login
Yes
Yes
Price
$7/yr
$14 one-time
Data collection
Data not linked: – purchases – diagnostics
Data not linked: – purchases – diagnostics – usage data
Rating
4.3 with 21 reviews
4.9 with 192 reviews
First release
Nov 24, 2020
Jan 22, 2021
Latest release
Oct 28, 2021
Dec 3, 2021
All data as of Jan 3, 2022
Let me know in the comments if I’m missing any feature comparisons or if there are any other Pinboard apps or tools you’d like to recommend.