Mobile Photography Apps Worth Paying For: What's Actually Worth the Price?

[Baz]

Free mobile photography apps are good. Paid ones are sometimes much better and sometimes exactly the same with a subscription bolted on. The market has clarified a bit and the genuinely useful paid apps have separated from the opportunistic subscription grabs.

Lightroom Mobile has a free tier that's genuinely useful and a paid tier that unlocks proper desktop sync and advanced masking. Snapseed remains free and remarkable. VSCO has a subscription but its film presets are distinctive enough that some people pay for them. Halide is a proper manual camera app for iPhone that camera geeks swear by. Darkroom is another serious RAW editor with a genuinely fair business model.

What are you paying for in mobile photography? What free app surprised you? And what paid app did you try and decide wasn't worth it?