Four tools
Brush, pencil, marker and eraser β each with its own weight and edge, not one slider pretending to be four.
Fewer decisions, more drawing.
No account. No tutorial. No subscription. Eighteen colours and four tools, fixed β so there is nothing to choose before the first stroke, and nothing in the way after it.
The idea
Most of the work went into what isn't here.
Every drawing app I tried wanted something from me before it would let me draw a line. PaintBoard asks for nothing. That constraint decided every feature below β including the ones I removed.
Left out, on purpose
- βA colour picker
- βAccounts and sign-in
- βSubscriptions and in-app purchases
- βLayers, blend modes, brush engines
- βOnboarding and tooltips
- βA cloud that holds your drawings
What that leaves
- +Eighteen colours, chosen once so you don't have to
- +Four tools: brush, pencil, marker, eraser
- +Text you can drag, resize and rotate
- +Any photo as the canvas background
- +Full offline use β the network is only for ads
- +Export or share as PNG, straight from the canvas
What's in it
Six things, done properly.
Eighteen colours
A fixed palette. No wheel, no hex field, no decision to make before the first stroke.
Text on canvas
Type anywhere, then move, resize or rotate it. It lives in the drawing, so the eraser treats it like ink.
Photo backgrounds
Drop in a photo and draw over it. The photo never leaves the device.
Zoom, pan, rotate
Pinch to zoom for detail, rotate the canvas ninety degrees when the drawing wants a different orientation.
Share as PNG
One tap to save to your photos or hand it to any other app.
The palette
These eighteen. That's the whole set.
They came from the first version in 2017 and have not changed since. Picking a colour takes one tap, and it takes the same one tap every time.
Where it came from
Nine years, one screen.
I wrote the first version in 2017 as a native iOS app, for one reason: I wanted to sketch something quickly and every app on my phone made me set up first.
This year I rewrote it from nothing in Flutter, so the Android half of the world could have it too. The rewrite was almost entirely an exercise in restraint β the temptation to add layers, brushes and a colour wheel is constant, and every one of them would have cost the thing that makes it useful.
It is still one screen. It still has eighteen colours.
2017First release β native Swift, iPhone and iPad
2024Text on canvas, photo backgrounds
2026Rewritten in Flutter; Android release
NowVersion 3.0.3, on both stores
There's also PaintBoardPro on the App Store β a separate app with a full colour picker, not a paid tier of this one. PaintBoard is deliberately the simpler of the two, and it stays free.
Privacy
Your drawings stay on your phone.
There is no server to upload them to. Everything is handled on the device and is gone when you delete the app. The app is free and carries ads, which means Google AdMob and Firebase Analytics collect the usual advertising identifier and device information β all of it written out in the privacy policy.
Go draw something.
Free on both stores. It works offline, so you can install it now and use it on the plane.
