Sony Sketch
Sony Sketch was a drawing software created by Sony. It was downloaded tens of millions of times, and was selected as "Editor's Choice" by the Google Play team. At the end of 2018, Sony decided to close the project and let everyone in the team go. This was announced to Sketch's users in April 2019.
Background
[change | change source]Sony was still a major player in the mobile phone market in 2013, with the Xperia Z line of 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 difficult to fit into your pocket. However, it had an amazing feature: it could be used with any ordinary pencil. Sony developers were tasked with building a drawing app for this new phone.
Development
[change | change source]Sketch's guiding principle was that it should be simple to use. Advanced features were not welcome. Version 1.0 had a 16-color palette and a fixed set of about 40 stickers. There were no layers, text, or online features.
Several times during its existence, the Sketch app was on the verge of being canceled, but the developers persisted. They performed several internal demos that demonstrated the app's potential, including a functional frame-by-frame animation tool with GIF support! Unfortunately, they did not have enough time to complete it.
The first online features on Sketch were a cloud backup and sticker store, which were both popular. Private collaborations were also added. In order for them to work, your collaboration partner needed to have the app, and thus Sketch was launched on Google Play.
In the app testing forum, art started to appear. To the developers, the thought of art coming to the app was entirely alien to them. They assumed that users would only use Sketch for doodles and stickers. To provide a display for all the creations, the online community was launched towards the end of 2015.
Shutdown
[change | change source]At the end of 2018, Sony decided to shut down Sketch and let the entire team go. Users were notified of the shutdown on April 23rd, 2019. The team attempted to buy out the app and continue it outside of Sony, but failed. Despite the app shutting down, more people continued to use it, and community activity increased over the summer of 2019. During the app's final months, more than one million posts were shared each week. Sony shut down the online service on October 3rd, 2019. A few days later, it was removed from Google Play and the App Store; however, you can still download it with a link on Google Play on some devices.
Sketcher's United
[change | change source]A few weeks after the shutdown of Sketch, former members of the Sketch team launched the first version of the Sketchers United website. Sketchers United was made to be a replacement for Sony Sketch.
