Sony Sketch
Sketch - Draw & Paint, or Sony Sketch (Italian: Schizzo Sony, Schizzo di Sony, French: Croquis Sony), officially known as Sketch and also currently referred to as it's successor Sketchers United (mistakenly known as Sketcher's United, or lowercased as Sketchers united), is a popular drawing app and community created and developed by Sony. The app was downloaded hundreds of millions of times and was selected as "Editor's Choice" by the Google Play team on an unknown date.
| Other names | Sketch - Draw & Paint |
|---|---|
| Original author(s) | Sony |
| Developer(s) | Sony |
| Initial release | 2014 |
| Engine | |
| Operating system | Android |
| Replaces | Sketch (MacOS) |
| Replaced by | Sketchers United |
| Available in | Multilingual |
Search Sony Sketch on Amazon.
At the end of 2018, Sony decided to close the app and let everyone in the team go. This was announced to their users, and the community later created the hashtag #SaveSonySketch. In April 2019, months before Sony Sketch shut down, People downloaded its successor, Sketchers United, when it was first released on Google Play and the App Store.
Background
Sony was still a major player in the mobile phone market in 2013, with a line of Xperia Z models attempting to capture a greater portion of the premium segment. The most unusual phone in the lineup was the Z Ultra, which was so large that it was very difficult to fit into your pocket. However, it had an amazing feature: it could be used with any ordinary pencil.
The Sketch team was tasked with building a drawing app for this new phone.
Development
The guiding principle of Sketch was that it should be very easy to use. Advanced features were not welcome. Sketch's first version had a palette of 16 colors, and a fixed set of about 40 stickers. There were no layers, no text, and no online features.
The Sketch app was nearly canceled several times during its lifetime, but each time they held on for a little while longer. They performed several internal demos that demonstrated the app's potential, including a functional frame-by-frame animation tool with support for the Graphics Interchange Format (often abbreviated as GIF). Unfortunately they did not have enough time to complete it.
The first known online features on Sketch is a cloud backup and a sticker store, which were both popular. Then came private collaborations, which virtually nobody used.
One good thing came out of it though; in order for them to work, your collaboration partner needed to have the app, Thus Sketch was launched on Google Play. The app received good reviews, and in the app testing forum, something started to appear - art!
To the developers, the thought of art coming to the app was entirely alien to them. They assumed that users would only use their little app for doodles and stickers. To provide a display for all the creations, a online community was launched towards late 2015.
Shutdown
In late 2018, Sony announced that they're shutting down Sketch and letting everyone in the entire team go. Users were notified of the shutdown after the announcement. The Sketch team attempted to buy the app and continue it outside of Sony, but it failed miserably. Despite the app shutting down, more people kept coming to the app, and the community's activity skyrocketed in summer of 2019. During the app's final months, more than one million posts were shared each week. In October 2019, Sony closed the app and community, and deleted more than 100 million sketches. Much of that art has unfortunately been lost forever. A few days later, the app was removed from Google Play and the App Store. At the time of the shutdown, Sketch had millions of users, and hundreds of millions of drawings stored in the cloud.
As of late 2019, online features were closed, and the app was removed from the official store in 2025, though it may still be available through third-party archives.
Sketchers United
Sketchers United was created by a team of Sony Sketch's developers who were let go in 2019 after Sony Sketch closed. They've been working to build a community of artists. There's plenty of information on Sketchers United and it's history on their About Page. They also have a frequently asked questions site, which may answer any questions you have. Overall, Sketchers is a tightknit community of artists who all work together and collaborate, building friendships as they do so.
References
- https://sketchersunited.org/sketch
- https://sketchersunited.org/about
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonymobile.sketch&gl=GB
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This article "Sony Sketch" is from Simple English Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Sony Sketch.
