Lign vs FaceApp
real photos, not AI hallucinations
FaceApp invents new photos with generative AI in the cloud. Lign aligns the photos you already have, on-device.
Where FaceApp stops
Generative AI face-warping uploads photos to cloud servers and hallucinates output. Reviewers report uncanny, fake-looking results that "make women look eerily similar" and "modify your hair" but also "your nose or eye shape."
Where Lign starts
Lign does not generate. It anchors. Your real photos, lined up by real geometry, processed on your iPhone. Not a Russian server, not OpenAI, not anywhere else.
Feature by feature.
| Feature | Lign | FaceApp |
|---|---|---|
| On-device processing (no upload) | ✓ | · |
| Real geometry, not AI hallucination | ✓ | · |
| Real photos as input AND output | ✓ | · |
| Aligns multiple photos | ✓ | · |
| Body, pet, object alignment | ✓ | · |
| Generative face filters (older, gender-swap, etc.) | · | ✓ |
From real users and the press
The result was uncanny.
It makes women look eerily similar.
Modifying my hair shouldn't change my nose or eye shape.
FaceApp creates its identity-morphing images by uploading the photos to cloud servers rather than processing the data right there on a person's phone.
FaceApp and Lign do not solve the same problem. FaceApp generates new images of you using cloud-hosted AI. Lign aligns the photos you already have using Vision math on your iPhone.
The difference is structural and has not changed since 2019. FaceApp uploads photos to its servers. Lign has no server. FaceApp synthesizes a hypothetical version of your face. Lign moves your real face into the same position across multiple frames.
If you want to see what you might look like older, gender-swapped, or with a different hairstyle, FaceApp is built for that, with the privacy trade-offs that come with cloud processing of face photos. If you want to see what you actually looked like at the start of a year and what you actually look like at the end of it, with nothing invented in between, that’s Lign.