Freeform wishlist for WWDC 2025

It’s almost WWDC, and time to ask the Cupertino gods for a boon. Though I’m very excited about the rumored diamorphic design, my desires are for something much simpler.

Sketching is my life.

I can’t imagine a way of working without it. It’s how I think and work as a designer.

And sketching on the iPad is a match made in heaven. I love using Freeform, it’s my number one app on the iPad.

Currently I’m rocking the iPad Mini 6 with an Apple Pencil USB-C. I’m hoping to upgrade soon on the hardware, but for now everything works quite well.

I’ve written and spoken a bit about Freeform in the past with a handful of posts.

• Freeform is the best iPad sketching app
• Freeform woes
• Sending sketches forward and backward in Freeform
• Freeform and iPad sketching in 2025

Following are my wishlist items for 2025’s WWDC:

• Better control for sending objects forward and backward - The current system for doing this is wonky. I’ve written about it a few times. I just wish Apple would overhaul this a bit and improve it.
• Better board renaming - I name my boards [Date] [Project]. Sometimes, often actually, I have multiple boards per day in a project. Freeform just throws an error that I’ve created a duplicate, and deletes my file name. This is annoying, and could easily be avoided in a number of ways.
• Rotating and mirroring sketches - I wish I could have a bit more control over the sketches that I make. Being able to rotate or swap things would be fantastic.
• Archiving boards and projects - Freeform starts to slow down after 100 boards. Having some way to better sort boards, or archive them, might help solve this problem.
• Straighten handwriting - This feature exists in Apple Notes, and is fantastic. I’d love for it to come to Freeform.
• Weird duplicating bug - There’s still an occasional issue I run into duplicating large groups of sketches. Half of the duplicated sketch will shift away from the other half, rendering the entire work as a big pile of spaghetti. I’ve found ways around this, but hope it can just be fixed.
• Undo shortcuts - I’d love to do three finger tap to undo, like in Procreate.
• Default colors and brush sizes - It’d be great if the app could remember which brush size I usually do, along with my color palette.
• Better grouping - Freeform has a feature to separate sketches and technically group them, but it’s weird and mislabeled. I’d love some improvements here in grouping overall.
• Moving and hiding tools - Some of the tools are just not needed. I’d like to be able to shift them around to see my most used tools on the iPad Mini’s small screen, or at least be able to hide the ones I don’t need.
• Export as PNG - Exporting as PDF is fine, but 99% of the time I need to convert it to PNG to pull into Figma. Having the extra option would be great.

I love this app, and as far as I can tell, have written on this more than anyone else out there. I hope it keeps getting improved, and will be watching Monday’s keynote for any Freeform callouts.