A better sketching app for iPad

I'm excited about the iPhone Duo.

Not least of all because it will finally enable the dream I've had for years—to be able to easily carry around a device for digital annotations at a moment's notice. I've tried this with the iPad mini (with varying success), and you'll often find me toting around an iPad of some size to capture thoughts and sketch out ideas. I can't wait to try one, and see if it scratches the itch I have for sketching on the go.

Along with that, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the software behind a good sketching app and what it needs; what's required of a great app to be able to capture ideas on the go.

Miro was one of the first apps that really figured it out. They had three elements going for them.

1. You could draw nice lines and have them smooth out in a way that made shaky-hand chicken scratch look elegant and thought through.
2. The app had a massive canvas, allowing you to throw ideas around and play with concepts without worrying about space.
3. You could share your drawings live with others.

In a way, that was really the inception of what was needed and laid the groundwork for many ideas that came later. Of course, you have send to back (and send to front), rotation, resizing, various colors and tools. But at its heart, you need an app that allows you to draw, redraw, copy and paste, and move things around within a large canvas.

It's amazing how hard it is to get these three elements right.¹

The apps I've tried

I've had a lot of apps over the years that I've tried for just this reason. Concepts is one. They do a lot of things right, but their brush circle tool gadget widget just doesn't click with my brain. It's too complex. I spend more time thinking about how I'm going to navigate and change my pen arrangement than I do actually just sketching.

Linea Sketch comes close. But they won't support large canvases, and their choice of raster over vector limits how I use the app.

And here's the thing. Apps like Procreate are fantastic for what they offer—but that's not what I'm looking for in this use case. I want to sketch out early-stage concepts for apps, websites, logos, illustrations. I don't need fancy brushes, a bunch of colors. I need great tools to manipulate those sketches and rearrange them at will (and I definitely don't need any AI integration).

So, why not do the obvious and switch to paper and pen(cil)? I have. I own many varieties of these analog devices, and I love each for what it offers. But I'm too attached to being able to copy a screen, move it around in post, and erase and redraw lines. I need to think freely, reshape and modify the layouts, and use the board as a mental model for how an app feature could exist.

There were other apps that came and went in my use. FigJam had promise, and if it exists on the iPadOS App Store, I've probably tried it.

Then along came Freeform

Then along came Freeform. Apple's own stab at this concept. And it did it better than any others. It had several of the elements I needed: massive canvas and decent tools to manipulate drawings. So I stuck with it for years.

I even called Freeform the best iPad sketching app back in 2023.

But it has two massive flaws.

First, it gets slow. You can't have hundreds of boards without it freezing up. I developed a flow of exporting PDFs of my drawings, one at a time, moving them to iCloud Drive, and then deleting them from Freeform, just to try and speed up this app—an app that was about 90% of my iPad usage. It just took too much babying.

This, along with the fact that a single drawing couldn't have more than, let's say, 1,000 vector strokes. Think about that: you need to draw an app screen, duplicate it, draw another one, move things around, build out a flow for a feature, and an hour or so later you might have a dozen screens with arrows moving between them. Then you need to duplicate an element of that and move it around—and suddenly the whole app freezes up. Freeform is notorious for this. When duplicating a group, I had to make sure I did it with the right incantation (group first, then copy and paste, don't duplicate) and hope it doesn't fly objects all around the board.

Fundamentally, these apps struggle with the math here, struggle with displaying all the vector paths and points that exist from the use case I need.

Send to back, and send to front

And then there was the other issue. And this is a big one. Send to back, and send to front.

Seems simple enough, seems like a solved concept that's existed in design applications for decades. Freeform just doesn't get it right. I've tried to figure out exactly what's happening—and even reached out to Apple and wrote about it for years—but at its core, you can't select a group of elements and guarantee that they'll move to the back or front on a z-index.

I don't know why. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's a complete mystery, and entirely infuriating when you're in the middle of a design.

Why does this matter?

Well, imagine you've sketched out a screen, laid it out as a wireframe, and now you need to add some color backgrounds to make certain elements stand out. Then, a few minutes later, you realize you need to add more UI elements, so you switch from the brush to the pen tool. All fine and good; you make some marks and get the colors just right. But, as you move back and forth, you'll come into a problem at some point in the process: a pen mark that sits on top of a brush stroke. A stroke in front of a fill. Sometimes that's fine, but in this case, you want it behind the fill. Now, try selecting it and sending it back. There's a 50/50 chance it won't work.

I've wrestled with this for years. Sometimes, if you pull the objects out, group them, copy and cut and paste, they MIGHT come back to the z-index you want. But it's not guaranteed.

Now, I'm not asking for send backwards and forwards, where you might move items up and down one level on the z-index at a time. I just want it to go from 0 to 9999. That's fine. I can manually bump things above or below as needed. But Freeform just can't handle this right.

That, along with Freeform and every other app being completely unable to handle large sketches, finally encouraged me to see if I could make my own.

Why sketching still matters

With all these tools to design apps and create them in minutes, we're fast losing the critical skills needed to really think about how pieces fit together, and it's far too easy to just keep talking to Claude or Codex and YOLO your way through and hope to find something good in the end. It can happen, but I don't believe that's the best use of a designer or programmer's time. Spending time sketching out by hand is still a critical part of this process.

And, now more than ever, we need a good, performant app that can handle the needs of someone building in 2026.

So, in my free time, I've been tinkering with just that. And this is where vibe coding comes in beautifully. I've tried to build apps in the past, tried to learn coding, but I keep getting stuck at the point of actual feature development.

Now, I can sketch out my ideas for an app, feed them into an LLM, and use its help to develop out the idea in Xcode. What a day to be alive.

Building my own

My app is still in private beta, but I'm using it daily, having replaced Freeform entirely. At some point I hope to release it, but I'm still dogfooding it to get to the point where many of the kinks and bugs are worked out. Maybe I should ignore that and ship sooner, but it's fun how some of the best problems get solved by really fixing a need that you personally have felt for years.

If you're curious to try it out, drop me a line (joshua@joshuawold.com) and I'll be happy to add you to the private beta.

1. Not to mention, back in my day I bought a Wacom Tablet—this was probably 2005, and would sketch out ideas on the tablet, into Adobe Illustrator. What a time to be alive. It was cumbersome, a lot to tag around, but it was the dream; digital drawing. The Wacom Tablet unfortunately disappeared into a drawer the moment I could get my hands on an iPad and Apple Pencil (I still have a little one, but it just doesn't make sense).