Best Stylus Apps 2024: Drawing, writing, and making

This past few months, I’ve noticed that there have been a lot more best stylus apps available. This is great news for creative people, organisers, and digital artists like me. These apps have made my creative experience much better and helped me get more done, whether I’m using a stylus with my tablet, phone, or a special pen display. I personally have used Procreate, Autodesk SketchBook, Adobe Illustrator Draw, Concepts, and Notability and found them to be some of the best stylus apps out there.

These apps have a lot of different features and functions that make it easy for me to make my art ideas come to life and take detailed notes. There are many ways to improve your creativity and speed up your digital workflow with these stylus apps, no matter how long you’ve been an artist or how new you are to it.

Let’s take a look at the best stylus and S Pen apps for Android. We would also like to mention Easy Canvas (Google Play). The application turns your Android tablets into a Wacom-style tablet for use with desktop drawing applications such as Photoshop and others. It is fairly new, but very promising. Below, we have mentioned the best apps for Stylus.

What is a stylus app?

A stylus app is a piece of software that is made to work with touch screen devices that allow stylus input, like smartphones, tablets, and some computers. A stylus is a tool that looks like a pen and lets you control how you touch the screen of your device more precisely than when you use your fingers. Apps for styluses are made to take advantage of this precise way to type by offering a wide range of features and functions.

Why use a stylus app?

Using a stylus app can be helpful in a number of ways, especially on touch-enabled devices like tablets and smartphones. People use stylus apps for the following reasons:

Precision: Using a stylus is more accurate and precise than using your fingers. This is especially helpful for things like drawing, sketching, handwriting, and editing photos, which require attention to small details.

Artists and designers often use stylus apps to make digital art, illustrations, and graphic designs. Many stylus pens respond to pressure, so you can change the thickness and transparency of your lines. This makes it easier to be creative.

Note-Taking: Stylus apps can make it feel like you’re writing on paper, so they’re often used to take notes, mark up documents, and mark up digital content. They can help students and professionals in particular.

Digital Drawing and Painting: Stylus apps provide a digital canvas for making art without the mess of traditional materials. There are a lot of apps with a wide range of brushes, colors, and effects that can be changed to get the artistic results you want.

Handwriting Recognition: Some stylus apps have handwriting recognition technology that lets people turn handwritten notes into digital text that can be changed. This can make it easier to turn handwritten content into digital files.

Best Stylus Apps

Coloring

Adult coloring pages are a popular way to relax and escape from the world for a while. Coloring is an application that includes many free images to color on the go. It is convenient that there is a left-handed mode and a huge color palette. You can use the Bucket tool to color the image piece by piece, or color in crayon with a pencil. The app has a library of premium images that can be unlocked with coins or accessed in full by subscribing for $2.99 for one month or $4.99 for three months. Both subscription options include a three-day trial.

Sketchbook

Autodesk Sketchbook is a drawing application available for computers and mobile devices. It is somewhat like Photoshop and its many alternatives in that it is a bitmap editor, but what makes it unique is that it places a lot of emphasis on drawing, sketching, and creating illustrations quickly. Unlike Photoshop, Sketchbook is not designed for image manipulation or photography. Instead, the application includes a wide range of tools designed for artists and designers, from drawing and line tools to brushes, textures, gradients, and blending modes.

The application makes full use of layers, so you can easily group and rearrange different elements. In addition to the basic ones, Sketchbook includes several more specialized tools. These include a set of guides and rulers, perspective guides, distortion transformation, brush blending, simple gradients, and a separate “Flipbook” animation mode.

Bamboo Paper

Bamboo Paper follows the excellent Penultimate in its simple approach. You get little more than a virtual piece of paper on which to scribble drawings and letters. The choice of ink is limited to six colors and the pen thickness is only three. An eraser, Undo and Redo, and a Bookmark function are also available. The latter appears to make little more than a marker in the corner of the page. Only one notebook is provided and, compared to Penultimate, the range of paper styles is very limited.

But Bamboo Paper has what you need: a handwriting engine. Few applications come close to Penultimate’s engine. But Wacom could do better. The feeling of “ink” appearing under the stylus tip when writing is very natural, and if you quickly swipe the tip, the line disappears as if you were writing with a marker or brush.

Adobe Photoshop Sketch

Adobe Photoshop Sketch can be used alone, with Adobe Photoshop CC, or with Illustrator CC. The Sketch app works in layers, and you can include anything created in the app in a project using any of the desktop tools. The Android app has five pen and brush options, each with a color picker and size options.

You can also add a variety of lines and shapes, as well as images from other applications. An Adobe account is required to access the app, but a free version is available that includes access to Adobe’s stock photo collection, cloud storage, and the ability to send the file to Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC with entire layers.

Evernote

No two workflows are the same, but Evernote can help you stay productive and organized. First, Evernote is relatively easy to use. Due to its popularity and large user base, tutorials are everywhere. Thanks to the low learning curve, it won’t take you long to understand the application. Evernote organizes notes into notebooks, which are basically file folders. The notes themselves are text files with a standard blog-style GUI for formatting text, inserting images or entering basic code blocks.

Two of the most useful features are note tags and the Evernote Web Clipper browser extension. Note tags work like tags in a blog post or like hashtags. This gives you a second way to organize your notes. Tags are useful for searching through notes and categorizing them for later use.

MyScript Calculator 2

MyScript Calculator 2 is probably the best calculator for stylus and S-Pen enthusiasts. You literally write down the equation you want to solve. The application uses OCR to convert it into an equation and then solve it for you. It is great for middle school, high school and college math. However, once you get past trigonometry, the app starts to struggle.

To be honest, it is fun to watch this app work. You can also copy and paste solutions (and problems) from this app into other apps without any problem. This is a very good deal for such an app, and $2.99 is quite reasonable. There are no additional ads or in-app purchases in the app.

Snapseed

Teachers themselves can use Snapseed to create attractive and illustrative photos for lessons or presentations. Students can also use Snapseed for their personal expression or projects. Its best use is in an art or photography class, but it can be a useful tool for any class where students take and share images for research projects or portfolios. Because the app is free and available for iOS and Android, it is easy for most students to access and use.

If you or your students are new to photo editing apps, check out all the editing options on the support page. There is also a support forum dedicated to this app with many people willing to help. One way teachers can start a collective self-editing session on Snapseed is to invite students to spend the day taking photos of each other, nature, architecture, or whatever catches their eye.

Simplenote

Created by the geniuses at WordPress, Simplenote is the most minimalist application on this list. There is nothing to see, you are immediately greeted with the ability to take notes. While sticking to its conservative implementation, Simplenote’s list of features may seem bare to some. This is because Simplenote is not intended to be a heavyweight in the clipboard business. The goal is only to make it easier for laypeople to take notes and make a shopping list, not essays and dissertations.

You need a Simplenote account to access your notes and store them in the cloud. And yes, the app is available on multiple platforms. You can organize your notes using the tags and labels available in the app. But don’t expect hierarchical organization or other complex sorting methods.

Squid: Take Notes, Markup PDFs

Teachers who wish to reduce the amount of paper piling up on their desks or in student folders will find Squid – PDF Notes & Markups an attractive alternative to traditional notepads. Import an image, diagram or notes to share with your students. Use the graph paper feature to practice algebra or geometry problems. Or, if you can make an in-app purchase, you can switch to paper with PDF markup capabilities. In addition, students can easily switch between diagrams, drawings and written text without leaving the note.

Just turn the page by clicking the arrow and choosing a background. Use it for a quick formative assessment to check understanding. Since students can comment on pictures, diagrams, historical documents or virtually anything they find online, you can encourage them to use Squid for research projects and presentations. Remind students of copyright and privacy protection laws if they plan to publish their content online.

What are the benefits of using a stylus app?

Using a stylus app has a lot of benefits, especially when used on tablets and smartphones with touchscreens. Here are some of the reasons why you might want to use a stylus app:

Precision and Control: A stylus lets you use touch interactions with precision and control. This is especially helpful for things like drawing, handwriting, and editing photos with a lot of detail. It can also help people make better choices and notes.

Natural Feel: Many stylus apps are made to feel like using traditional tools like pencils or brushes to write or draw. This can make the user’s experience better and make the digital space feel more familiar and easy to use.

Artistic Expression: Artists and designers like stylus apps because they let them do a lot of different kinds of art. Artists can make digital art that looks a lot like traditional art by using pressure sensitivity and different brush options.

Writing by Hand and Taking Notes: Stylus apps are great for writing notes directly on a touchscreen device. They can turn handwriting into text, which makes it easier to sort and find notes. This is helpful for students and professionals in particular.

Annotation and Markup: Documents, presentations, and pictures can all be annotated with stylus apps. A stylus app makes the process of reading documents, making notes on diagrams, or giving feedback on designs easier and more accurate.

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