Your Android phone or tablet, or alternatively your iPhone or iPad, come with a nice touchscreen! And certain phones support active styluses, such as the Galaxy S22 Ultra, while pretty much all of them also support passive styluses. You can utilize those to do some hobbyist or even professional drawing, or at least to give this artform a go.
Drawing on your phone or tablet can indeed be really fun, and a great learning experience too. So if you have the right phone or tablet, and a stylus ready, it's time to pick your app of choice! Both Android and iOS offer great drawing apps to choose from, as we'll find out soon enough.
Below we have for you the best mobile drawing apps! Let's see what those are. For the sake of convenience, we'll split those in best drawing apps for Android, and best drawing apps for iPhone / iPad. Starting with the best apps for drawing on your Android phone or tablet...
Infinite Painter is one of the most popular Android drawing apps, but luckily - if you're an iPhone user - it's available on the App Store too.
It offers pretty much everything you'd want from a pocket-sized drawing app - plenty of brushes with different textures, support for layers, and like most apps, it works with both an active stylus (e.g. Samsung's S Pen stylus) and generic, passive ones.
Similar to Infinite Painter, Sketchbook has plenty of brushes to choose from, plus layers to work with.
And it's free to download, no in-app purchases either! If you value simplicity above all, and just need the basics, Sketchbook is definitely worth checking out.
And from simplicity, we're jumping straight to complexity. Clip Studio Paint is the Android app to get if you're really serious about your drawing, particularly on an Android tablet.
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Because this app's interface is essentially what you'd expect from a full-blown desktop app for PC - it has menus that are kind of better suited for a mouse, but hey - it works with a stylus just as well.
Clip Studio Paint comes free for a trial period of up to 6 months, after which you'll have to set up a $0.99 monthly plan.
Adobe offers several drawing apps, with Adobe Illustrator Draw being one of my personal favorites, as it does offer just about anything you'd want from a mobile drawing app.
However, Adobe requires that you make an account with it, unlike the rest of these apps, which is why this one is last on the Android list, and hard to recommend over them.
Still, if you're already into Adobe's ecosystem or just wish to give it a go, you can download Adobe Illustrator Draw for Android, and for iPad. There's no iPhone version, though.
Despite being a free ad-supported app, ibis Paint X offers all the essentials you'd expect too. Work with layers, lots of brushes, and even blending modes. You can also unlock its "prime" version for more features via a monthly or yearly subscription, or just choose to remove the ads with a single payment.
This drawing app prides itself in being lightweight, plus extremely easy and simple to use. Despite this, it still offers over 1000 brushes to pick from, its own fonts, backgrounds, textures and other recourses, and can even work with cloud storage.
Whether you want a simple drawing app for basic sketching, or you're looking to make some more complex drawings, even comics of your own and want to save on time by using free assets, MediBang Paint is worth checking out.
Best drawing apps for iPhone and iPad
All the apps we listed for Android can be downloaded and used on iPhone as well, except for Adobe Illustrator Draw, which is only for Android and iPad.
However, the iPad and iPhone have the following exclusive apps that are definitely worth mentioning and checking out, if you're on an Apple device...
In my experience, Procreate for the iPad is by far the greatest mobile drawing app you can get for a tablet. Of course, its iPhone version - the Procreate Pocket is no slouch either.
What Procreate offers is plenty of brushes to work with, a powerful brush-making tool, multi-layer support, and superb optimization for your Apple device. In fact, plenty of legitimate professionals use this app with their iPad and Apple Pencil - it's that good.
As the name suggests, this is the "pocket" version of Procreate. Because unlike iPads, iPhones don't have stylus support, not to mention restrict you to a smaller display, Procreate Pocket will be inevitably harder to use. But in any case, it still offers a ton of great features for artists who are looking to either make changes to their works, or create completely new ones on the go.
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Rado, a tech enthusiast with a love for mobile devices, brings his passion for Android and iPadOS to PhoneArena. His tech journey began with MP3 players and has evolved to include tinkering with Android tablets and iPads, even running Linux and Windows 95 on them. Beyond tech, Rado is a published author, music producer, and PC game developer. His professional work on iPads, from producing songs to editing videos, showcases his belief in their capabilities. Rado looks forward to the future of mobile tech, particularly in augmented reality and multi-screen smartphones.
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