Sony Sketch

» see sketch.sonymobile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Sketch was an app you did not choose. It arrived on Xperia phones the way Samsung's hubs arrived on Galaxies and Huawei's gallery arrived on Huaweis, as a tile in the drawer that most people swiped past. The difference is that a meaningful number of people opened this one, and some of them turned out to be very good at drawing with a finger.

It shipped on 4 November 2014, built for the big-screen Xperia hardware of that moment. For the first year it was a local tool: brushes, layers, a stylus mode, files on your device. The social layer came at the end of 2015, and that is when it stopped being a utility. sketch.sonymobile.com went up with profiles, a follow graph, hashtags, collaborative canvases where two people drew on the same image, and four browse feeds called Featured, Popular, Trending and World.

By the time anyone counted, the global feed listed about 23 million sketches. The house account that every new user was made to follow showed 1,795,890 followers in May 2019 and 2,073,078 by July. Those are the numbers of a real social network, inside a phone manufacturer's bundled art toy, run by a team small enough that Sony could close it in one decision.

~ the dossier ~

~ the notice ~

The end-of-life page went up on 23 April 2019 and the Internet Archive has it two days later. It is plain and short, and it is signed, which is rarer than it should be:

"Dear Sketch users, The online parts of the Sketch service will be discontinued on 30th of September 2019. All syncing, sticker downloads, as well as community functionality will stop working. You will still be able to draw sketches and store them on your device. The local sketches on your device will not be affected. The Sketch team would like to thank you for a greatly inspirational and fulfilling five years. We are very proud of the community you helped us build throughout these years. It has been an exceptional experience. Thank you! The Sketch Team"

Two instructions followed: download all your data from the app, and exchange contact details with the people you want to keep. The second one is the honest half. Sony could hand back your drawings. It could not hand back the strangers whose work you checked every morning, and it knew that, and it told you to go collect them yourself before the lights went out.

~ drawn in a rival ~

The Sketch wordmark is a paintbrush over the word in six colors, and the SVG the site served still carries the comment the design tool left in it: "Generator: Sketch 50.2 (55047) - http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch". Sony's Sketch had its logo drawn in Bohemian Coding's Sketch. The name collision also explains why the product was effectively unsearchable for its entire life, which cannot have helped a phone-bundled app that needed people to find it on purpose.

~ what got buried with it ~

Archive Team ran a grab against the site before the deadline and the result is marked partially saved, which for a feed of 23 million images is the only honest label available. The API that powered the explore view would list everything if you asked it politely, and they did ask, but image files redirected to signed Amazon S3 URLs with expiry timestamps on them. A link that worked on a Tuesday was dead by the weekend. That is the modern version of linkrot and it makes a service effectively unarchivable by anyone outside the company.

The app itself kept working offline and is still installable from third-party mirrors. Google removed the Play Store listing in January 2025, five and a half years after the servers went, which means the thing outlived its own distribution by about as long as its community existed.

Users tagged their goodbyes #GoodbyeSketch. The tag page still exists in the archive, and most of the images it points at do not.

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