Freeform and iPad sketching in 2025

Apple has long created a developer ecosystem for great apps to get made. They’ve also created or acquired apps and brought them into the fold. Sometimes this works well, othertimes we’re left holding our breath.

The recent Journal, Sports, and Invites apps are interesting. They each have a specific niche they’re filling. I like Journal, but haven’t used it yet in a daily capacity. Sports is delightful, but I’m not that into sports. Invites seems like it could be a match, but I rarely send out invites.

All that’s to say, I enjoy when Apple plays in the app playground and tests the limits of what they can make.

My favorite example in recent years of an Apple app is Freeform. I wrote about this previously, how it’s the best iPad sketching app.

It’s good enough (and free) that I moved away from Miro (a fantastic app which had major connectivity issues the last time I was using it) and Linea Sketch (an amazing app for sketching, but with such a limited canvas that I can’t use it for UX sketching).

The biggest limitation I find with all these apps is they can’t handle the level of output I create on a weekly basis. They seem to slow down once I’ve added hundreds of files. And because he line I draw is a separate vector object (Linea Sketch being the exception) it seems that creating anything more than a dozen app screens in a single file makes the whole thing unwieldy.

I’ve been curious if e-ink tablets would solve my problems, but I’m guessing the amount of drawings and size of canvas that I need would be an issue.

Still, Freeform is the best out of all these options. I can generally create up to a dozen screens before it slows down, and the app stays fast enough so long as I’m meticulous about exporting files to PDF and deleting them.

I’m also wondering if a faster iPad could solve some of the issues I’ve faced. Perhaps more disc space and memory would alleviate the slowness I’m dealing with.

If I had a wishlist for Freeform moving forward I’d like a few things to change.

Zooming

Allow zooming in and out on the Mac to operate similar to Figma. The Mac app is so odd that I can only zoom in at 25% intervals, instead of command+mouse scroll wheel in and out like every other good design app I use.

Moving objects to front and back

Freeform has a feature to select a group of objects and move them all the way from the front or to the back. Though I’d wish for a bit more fine grained control, such as move back and move forward (instead of all the way back or forward) I’d be happy with the feature if it actually worked. Half of the time the button is grayed out, without any indication of why. My closest guess is Freeform loses track of the layer state of drawings that when you create large groups of objects, duplicate them, and then leave the file and return. When it doesn’t work I have to fiddle with it, redraw things, and hope and pray that I can just get that one background to show up behind a drawing.

Fills and strokes

This is such a basic feature in any drawing app that I wish Freeform would get right. Imagine we’re drawing a box with a pen tool. So in this case the stroke of the box is black. At some point we may want that box to have a background of light gray. Freeform has several tools for doing this, including a marker, a paint bucket type tool, and a watercolor brush.

But, when creating, duplicating, and moving things around (this is similar to the previous issue I raised) something happens with the layer state of the fill and stroke where you’re no longer able to apply a background currectly.

So I’m 10 screens deep into a UX flow, I create a new box and want to give it a background. Freeform decides that’s not an option. The background simply cannot go behind the stroke, no matter how many times I try to press the stupid send to back button.

The randomness of it leaves me always unsure whether to duplicate objects, knowing at some point the wizard behind the screen will tell me my time is up, and the design is no longer changeable.

Renaming files

For almost a decade I’ve had a naming convention for files. If I’m going to create a new file in Freeform (or a notes doc or anywhere else) I type the date and the project name. In this case it might be 20250218 Widgets. In the case of Freeform I create a board with this name and go about my drawing. However, at some point in the day I might need a second board. I wouldn’t do this if Freeform could actually handle large amounts of objects in the board, but because of weird issues in the past I tend to create new boards as soon as I have a new idea I want to play with. As mentioned before the process of opening and closing files and duplicating objects seems to mess with the ability to use strokes and backgrounds the way I’d like.

So throughout the day I might have 20250218 Widgets, 20250218 Widgets r2, 2025 Widges r3, and so on. The problem though, is that when I’m naming a new board I can’t see the previous boards I’ve created, and I often can’t remember how many of the same file name I’ve made that day. So, at least a few times a week I’ll take the time to type out the entire title on the iPad mini (a slow task because I don’t use a keyboard), and Freeform will throw up an infuriating error that it’s a duplicate of an existing filename. When you press ok to close the dialog Freeform has reverted my name to Untitled. There are so many better ways to handle this. Freeform could simply amend the word copy to the end of the name, they could add their own numbering system, they could allow duplicate names, or most easily create the error dialog, but keep the name I had and allow to modify the title, instead of deleting the whole thing.

Ruler

This is the most useless tool in the app. It behaves weirdly, comes up when I don’t want it, and is too easy to tap on. I wish there was a way to hide the tool.

Sorting tools

On the iPad mini I commonly use the pen tool and watercolor background. Because of lack of space I have to scroll back and forth on the toolbar, moving past the stupid Ruler tool. If I can’t hide a tool I wish I could sort the placement of tools.

Defaults

I wish I could set my own default colors and tool. Every time I create a new board I update the Pen tool to the middle stroke size. This is something I do EVERY single time, and I wish Freeform was smart enough to remember that I only want that size. I also wish I could change the default colors that appear on every board. You can go in and add custom colors, but you can’t change the few options that appear in the main toolbar.

Wonkyness with selecting

The magic lasso tool works, mostly, but often misses objects I wanted or adds in objects I don’t want. I just wish this worked better.

Resizing and moving

Sometimes when moving and resizing large groups of objects Freefrom will decide that sub groups of the objects should move at different positions. It is likely related to the file being too large, but it’s hard to know for sure.

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There’s more that bugs me about Freeform, such as wishing I could two-finger tap to undo, and wishing that collaborative editing (or just using the same board on multiple devices) worked faster. But the reason I’ve written about my complaints is because I really do like this app. It’s the best tool for sketching on the iPad, and I just want it to get better.