Apple / photo_and_video / REELSAPP: REEL & VIDEO EDITOR
REVIEW
Reelsapp is a competent template editor wearing a confusing name.
A third-party short-video maker that has nothing to do with Instagram Reels, and would be easier to recommend if its name didn't suggest otherwise.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Reelsapp: reel & video editor
RUSTAM ACHILOV
OUR SCORE
6.2
APPLE
★ 4.8
PRICE
Free
The app’s biggest design choice was not in the timeline but in the name on the icon, and it is the choice that will trip up the most users. “Reelsapp: reel & video editor” is not made by Meta, is not affiliated with Instagram, and does not publish to Reels directly. It is a third-party short-video editor that happens to export the right aspect ratio, sitting on a name that does a lot of accidental marketing work.
Look past the branding and the actual product is a perfectly reasonable template-driven editor in a crowded category. The beat-synced presets do the hardest part — figuring out where to cut — and the free tier is more generous than most. Whether that’s enough to choose it over CapCut, VN, or InShot is the only real question, and the answer is usually no.
The app's biggest design choice was not in the timeline but in the name on the icon, and it is the choice that will trip up the most users.
FEATURES
Reelsapp opens to a grid of vertical templates — transitions, beat-synced cuts, lyric overlays — built for 9:16 export to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and yes, Instagram Reels. Pick a template, drop in three to ten clips, and the app stitches them to the music with the cuts already placed. From there you can trim, reorder, add text layers, swap the soundtrack, and adjust per-clip speed and filters.
Beyond the templates there's a freeform timeline with split, ripple-delete, audio ducking, a small library of stickers, and a green-screen mode that does the chroma-key on-device. Export tops out at 1080p with a watermark on the free tier; the subscription removes the watermark and unlocks the longer templates and higher-tier music library.
Project autosave is local-only — no cloud sync, no cross-device handoff. Imports come from the photo library or Files; there's no direct camera roll-replacement workflow.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The template flow is the reason to install this. For someone who wants a finished vertical video in under five minutes without learning CapCut's timeline, the beat-synced presets do real work. The cuts land on the right frame more often than they don't, and the included music catalogue is broader than what Apple's Clips ships with.
Pricing is honest by the standards of the category. The free tier exports 1080p with a corner watermark you can actually live with, and the subscription is a single tier — not the three-stair upsell most short-video editors push.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The name is the problem. "Reelsapp: reel & video editor" reads, on a Spotlight search or an App Store result, as if it were Meta's official Instagram Reels companion. It is not. It is an unrelated third-party editor that exports a file you then upload to Instagram yourself, and the App Store listing does not work hard enough to disambiguate. Users land here looking for something else, and the one-star reviews show it.
The editor itself thins out next to CapCut and VN. There's no keyframe animation, no curve speed-ramping, no audio waveform on the timeline, and the text engine is limited to a dozen preset styles with no custom font import. Project files are trapped on-device with no export-as-project, so a phone reset means starting over.
CONCLUSION
Install this if you want a template-first editor for one-off short videos and you understand it has nothing to do with Meta. If you're already in CapCut or VN, stay there — Reelsapp doesn't catch up on the timeline side. And if you actually wanted Instagram's own Reels tools, those live inside the Instagram app, not here.