DrawBuddy crossed 50,000 active users this week. It is our oldest app and the only one we still make in Flutter. Here are a few notes from running an education-adjacent app for almost three years.
The audience surprised us
We shipped DrawBuddy thinking it was for kids. The data says otherwise. About 48% of our users are over 35. A real chunk of those are people who always wanted to draw, never learned, and finally have the time and the curiosity to try. That changed how we wrote our App Store listing, our screenshots, and our onboarding.
Trace-to-learn is not cheating
The traditional drawing-instruction crowd is allergic to tracing. Their argument: it teaches you nothing about seeing. We disagree. Tracing teaches you about line, about pressure, about confidence. It is the equivalent of sounding out words before you can read them.
Our users tell us this in their reviews. Once they have done a few traced tutorials, they start drawing freehand, in the same app, with the same tools.
The hardest thing was the camera
Making a camera-based tracing experience feel good required us to rebuild the camera module twice. The current version uses ARKit for surface detection and a stabilisation step that smooths small hand movements. It is the part of the app we are most proud of and the part nobody talks about.
Where we are going
In 2026 we plan to ship:
- Custom subjects — upload a photo, get a guided trace from it.
- Skill ladders — short structured paths for specific outputs (a face, a hand, a tree).
- A creator mode — for art teachers who want to ship their own lesson packs through the app.
If any of those interest you, DrawBuddy is here. Half a million strokes a day go through that app. The pencil is in your pocket. There is no excuse left.