It used to be difficult to find a high quality drawing application on Android with a robust set of features that people have grown to expect. Now, we have options including MediBang Paint, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator Draw and a few others. One of the standout options available has been an application called SketchBook from the company Autodesk. The application was free to download but required you to pay $2.99 to unlock the Pro Tools via an in-app purchase. Since the market is maturing and the competition is heating up, Autodesk has announced they are removing the $2.99 in-app purchase so that SketchBook is completely free.
The features that SketchBook offered for free were nice and that’s why it was able to amass over 10 million downloads since it was first released. The company decided to monetize the application by limiting some of the features that it offered. For instance, the free version only lets you import an image with its Scan Sketches feature at a maximum of 1280 x 1280 pixels but this was increased to an unlimited size once you paid for the in-app purchase and unlocked the application’s Pro Tools.
With the latest update that was just pushed out yesterday, everyone will have access to those features that were locked behind the Pro Tools in-app purchase. This includes things such as the ability to use a customizable canvas size, over 130 preset bushes, predictive stroke and unlimited undo drawing tools, straight, circular and ellipse rulers, gradient and flood fill and more. You can find a full list of the features here that the old (free) application used to give you along with what the new free version gives you today.
Screenshots source: Autodesk
So if you gave up on SketchBook from Autodesk in the past because it had features locked behind an in-app purchase then you may want to give it a download now to see how things have improved.
SketchBook - draw and paint (Free, Google Play) →