On top of that, Astropad users are reaching for the Apple Pencil more and more to create art. When we lay out the evidence, here’s what we know: third-party styluses consistently deliver poor performance and create added engineering complexities. Discontinuing Astropad Support for Third-Party Styluses So, even though people continue to pair their third-party styluses with Astropad, there is an overwhelming preference for Apple Pencil. In the month of May 2018, 21% of new styluses paired with Astropad were third-party styluses, but third-party styluses make up a mere 2% of stylus events for the month. Non-Apple Pencil users aren’t very active! It’s clear from this graph that third-party stylus activity has stagnated compared to the Apple Pencil. In the graph below, you can see a quarterly breakdown of stylus activity - each moment a stylus interacts with the iPad in Astropad - from January 2016 through March 2018. We’d like to note that we only collect anonymous data in aggregate, and we do not track information from individual users. The proof is in the app analyticsįirst, we took a bird’s-eye-view of our stylus history dating back to Astropad’s launch. But before we did anything drastic, we wanted to know: were digital artists still using these styluses? We dug into our app analytics to look for answers. It was clear on our end that third-party styluses delivered poor performance and extra engineering hurdles for Astropad. In these situations, it feels like the quality of an Astropad user’s experience is out of our control.” Adam Mika, Astropad’s Senior iOS Engineer, explains his frustration that whenever there’s a new iPad or iOS update, “an artist may find that their stylus is completely incompatible with Astropad until the stylus brand updates the stylus SDK. You can see that even after the improvements, there is still significant line waviness - an unacceptable flaw for pro digital artists.ĭemo images taken from Wacom’s iOS Stylus SDK 2.1.6 Release Notes Engineering complexitiesįrom a development perspective, Astropad code interacts differently with each third-party stylus brand, presenting unique engineering challenges. Below are Wacom’s “Before” and “After” shots of their improvements for the iPhone X. In Wacom’s iOS Stylus SDK Release Notes earlier this year, Wacom shared the results of an update that “greatly improves line waviness issues” when using the Bamboo styluses on iPhones. Malyse McKinnon, Astropad’s Director of Artist Relations, notes that these styluses “generally offer limited pressure range, requiring artists to apply far more force than what feels natural for illustration and painting.” From our findings, other shortcomings included inconsistent palm rejection and difficulty pairing with the iPad.Ī clear example of these performance issues can be seen with Wacom’s Bamboo Sketch and Bamboo Fineline styluses. In our extensive QA testing, we found that pressure sensitivity in third-party styluses was not as refined as the Apple Pencil. If the stylus you’re using has performance shortcomings, your overall experience in Astropad isn’t going to be as smooth as we built it to be. To get to the bottom of this, we took a hard look at stylus performance and user analytics to understand how third-party styluses were stacking up against the Apple Pencil.Īn early screenshot from Astropad’s website Third-party performance issues The Apple Pencil just worked, and it felt like a dream come true for digital artists.Īs we refined the Astropad experience in the following years, we found ourselves in a fundamental dilemma: we wanted our users to have the freedom to work with the tools they wanted, but were we willing to compromise the quality of their Astropad experience for that freedom? Finally, we had a stylus that was made specifically for the iPad and guaranteed pixel-perfect precision. When we first launched Astropad (software that turns your iPad into a graphics tablet for Mac) back in 2015, we wanted to give artists tools to create high-quality digital art anywhere they liked, however they liked.Īt the time, the Apple Pencil didn’t exist, so our only choice was to ensure compatibility with nearly every major third-party stylus on the market, such as Wacom, Adonit, Pogo, Hex, and FiftyThree - in total, over twenty different models! But despite extensive stylus testing, we found that there wasn’t a single stylus that met our quality standards for Astropad.Įverything changed in the fall of 2015 with Apple’s announcement of the Apple Pencil. Update: We have discontinued support for third-party styluses Third-party styluses: we need to talk.
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