About Us

Mandelbrot Metal is an independent software studio focused on creating breakthrough experiences at the intersection of art, science, mathematics, and high-performance computing. Founded by developer Michael Stebel, the studio pushes the limits of hardware and graphics technologies to build apps that are not only technically advanced but also visually extraordinary.

The studio’s flagship app, Mandelbrot Metal, brings the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, and related fractals, to life on iPhone and iPad through high-performance, real-time rendering. Engineered as a showcase for Apple’s Metal® framework, Mandelbrot Metal supports ultra-deep zoom, HDR color workflows, 8K+ exports, 3D visual effects, and more than 155 curated color palettes, transforming abstract mathematics into a precise, immersive visual experience. It climbed to #3 in the App Store’s Paid Graphics & Design category and has remained in the Top 100 every week since its October 2025 launch, consistently charting alongside long-established creative tools.

Mandelbrot Metal is also developing PaletteWright, a native SwiftUI color compiler built from the palette technology behind Mandelbrot Metal. Where most color tools stop at swatches, PaletteWright treats color as a build artifact: it imports colors from palettes, photos, websites, and CSS; normalizes them through perceptual color models; audits and repairs them for accessibility; maps them into semantic and component roles; and emits production-ready tokens, CSS, framework themes, native app code, and audit output developers can actually ship. PaletteWright is designed for developers, web designers, app builders, and design-system teams, and runs on MacOS 26+, iPadOS 26+, and iPhone 26+.