Evolving Gravity Sketch’s screen creation tools

Despite a passion and belief in spatial computing, we first launched on the iPad as a way to bring an intuitive 3D creation experience to the community on a hardware platform that was already mature at the time. As we've been focused on the development of the Gravity Sketch spatial creation experience, we’re now unlisting the app from the app store - here's what that means for new and existing users.

History

Gravity Sketch launched our first product on the iPad back in 2016. The decision to build for the screen first was based on our acute knowledge of the power of 2D sketching; it’s the most immediate way to get an idea out of your mind. Our goal has been to provide access to our creation and communication tools to a wide range of creatives with a relatively low bar to entry and even today the screen is the most accessible platform. All ideas start with a sketch, and we want to provide avenues for users to ideate and express their ideas without being limited by devices. 

Why we’re unlisting the iPad app

With the rise of VR over the past few years, we’ve had limited resources to focus on building a great experience for both virtual reality and the iPad’s touch and pen input. We decided to double down the development of the Gravity Sketch spatial creation experience and as a result, we weren’t able to bring feature parity and support for the iPad. 

  • We have not been able to dedicate the time or capacity to maintaining and innovating on the iPad app. We don’t feel it’s fair to the users to keep this as part of our ecosystem. 
  • Although there is no Gravity Sketch replacement there are a lot of great iPad sketching apps available — we’re confident that our users can build a workflow with the other tools available 
  • This isn’t the end of screen creation apps for us, our goal is to become truly hardware agnostic bringing a solution that can work on any screen. We will take some time to regroup and come up with a more responsible plan for the development of a great screen creation experience that can nicely complement our Virtual reality toolset. 

What this means for iPad app users

  • Nothing in the immediate future: We’re unlisting the app from the app store but this shouldn’t impact anyone who already has downloaded.
  • Long term, you will notice an impact as we are ceasing all support for the app going forward, so there will be some tech degradation and bugs that we won’t address. 

What’s on the roadmap?

  • We’re exploring a device-agnostic screen creation tool
    • A great early stage idea generation tool, allowing designers to get a few strokes out in the same way they are used to sketching in photoshop. 
    • We would limit this to a few set views: front, side, top view and so forth. The user can then jump into the virtual environment to do more creative 3D exploration. 
    • Ability to navigate in 3D from the screen, go into editing modes, and move things spatially from the screen
  • Our surface extension will allow us to bring all users who are familiar with 2D sketching smoothly into the digital 3D space – not only iPad users
  • Taking a hardware agnostic approach to the problem we are solving will allow us to help designers at various stages of the process

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