The ex-Googler team behind the 3D design app Rooms from Things, Inc. is out with its latest project: it’s called a playful AI photo editor Mixing. The iOS-only app lets anyone create new AI-generated photos using Mad Lib-style “recipes” that fill in the blanks for your photos, text, or sketches.
For example, you can ask Mixing to turn your scribbled sketch into a beautiful Renaissance painting or to reimagine your pet in a funny Halloween costume. You could use a selfie to see what you’d look like with a different hairstyle, or create something even sillier – like envisioning a friend transformed into Italian encephalopathy.
The app is built on top of Google’s Nano Banana, but the “recipe” format opens up a new way to interact with the model — turning a maker tool into an online party game.
“The thing that [Nano Banana] it did what no model had done before was it could take your image and maintain it in a convincing way that wasn’t creepy,” said the founder and CEO of Things, Inc. Jason Toffwhose background includes working on experimental applications at Big Tech companies like Google and Meta, as well as time spent in product management at Twitter.
But what makes Mixup especially fun to use is that the app’s “recipes” — user-generated AI prompts — can be shared.
“Generative AI is so powerful, and yet most of the time you go to these tools and it’s like, here’s your text box — come up with something creative. And what are you writing?” Toff said, talking about the shortcomings his team saw with the current AI landscape.
“And so instead of having to be creative and think about what to create, you see something that worked and you can just fill in the blanks,” he said.
After users create a new message in Mixup, they can choose to post it along with the resulting photo to a public feed or simply download it for personal use. From the feed, other users can see the photo and tap the button next to it to “Try the recipe.” This allows anyone in the app to reuse the recipe to create an image using their own photo, text or sketches. (The latter can be done via a simple in-app drawing function.)
The team believes that seeing a photo next to the recipe that created it can also help deal with the unpredictable nature of AI images.
“Another problem [with generative AI] it’s what we’ve been referring to internally as the ‘slot machine’ problem, where you push the button, something comes out, you push it again, something different comes out, and you don’t feel like you’re in control of the output,” Toff explained.
In Mixup, however, users can see both the photo and the prompt that created it in one place, giving them an idea of what their output would look like. They can also toggle a button to see both the before and after image if the creator chooses to leave this setting enabled.
Additionally, similar to OpenAI’s AI video app Sora, users can upload their own photos to Mixup to use in their AI images. If you choose to do this, then each person you follow in the app can also create AI images with your own likeness – a feature it calls “blending”.
The company imagines that groups of friends would follow each other to take advantage of the feature, but a class of creators could also appear on the platform — if they don’t mind seeing themselves mashed in weird ways. (Of course, if you don’t want your image out there, either don’t upload it or don’t follow anyone.)
The app also uses OpenAI technology to handle some of the expected concerns about AI images, but Toff admits that Mixup also relies heavily on Google’s built-in controls in its image model to limit things like sexual content or violence.
At launch, Mixup is optimized for iOS 26, but supported on iOS 18 and later. If it takes off, a web version or Android app may be added later.
Free users get 100 credits, which is equivalent to $4. Meanwhile, images cost almost 4 cents to produce. When credits are used up, users can subscribe to different tiers that offer 100, 250 or 500 credits per month.
The app launches at midnight on November 21st on the App Store worldwide, but will require an invitation to enter. Mixup is available for pre-order ahead of its release.
This post was updated after it was published to note that the app will be released on November 21st, not November 20th as previously reported.
