Blark

The Blark black and white camera app is a rather new addition to my most used camera apps on my iPhone these days. I want to mention it here quickly because even though it's not perfect, it's doing a lot of things right. The Blark app is a pretty new app, it was first released in 2025, so at the pint of this writing it's just a couple of months old. And therefore the app makes good use of many advantages of the modern OSs. [--more--]

First of all the look and feel of the app just speaks to me. I like the rounded but not circle shutter button, the subtle UI elements and the careful yellow highlights of the interface. More important are the quality of the black and white filters that come with the app. My testing up to this point is far from complete, but the nine predefined filters do a pretty good job of covering all the different aesthetics that one could expect from such a black and white camera app. The approach of all these filters always remains subtle and professional without too much fancy and often just gross processing. Here and there some subtle grain is added to give the images some texture, which feels ok to me. And you always can tweak the settings of each filter and save those configurations as new custom filters to your library. So here the app is really flexible and versatile, I like this approach. One rather unique feature of this app is that you can also shoot black and white videos right within the app. There's a whole dedicated section for shooting video with its own custom set of features.

With new phones the app is capable of saving full resolution 48 megapixel photos in all formats and the performance of the live preview is still decent. Especially for beginners a good live preview of these black and white filters makes such a huge difference of the whole experience of taking black and white photographs.

All that said there are sadly some caveats. As I said the app is relatively new and there are still quite a few annoying bugs all across the interface and the mechanics of this app. Also it's not yet fully adapted to the 2025 iPhone 17s and their new lens configurations. The camera control button that has already been introduced with last year's iPhones is supported but its use is still rather buggy. The app tends to freeze in an odd landscape mode state whenever I try to launch the app from the lock screen by pressing the camera control button. Also so far the app makes no use at all of the light touch function or the swiping function of the camera control button which maybe is not immediately necessary but disappointing nonetheless. At least some options would be nice here.

In summary I wouldn't immediately recommend the Blark camera app to everyone. It's a good app with a lot of appeal, ambitions and potential. But so far it fails to deliver in some key points as the app has too many annoying quirks and bugs. So if you know what you're after and the app looks appealing to you, go for it. For all the others that look for a go to replacement for all their black and white camera needs maybe still hold on for a little longer until the major flaws and missing features are resolved or added.

The Blark camera app comes only as a subscription for one week for roughly 1 USD, for one month for 1,50 USD or a whole year for 8 USD. A lifetime option for 40 USD wasn't offered to me even though it's mentioned in the app description. Another quirk.