Imagining Krita on a Phone

Thursday, 3 July 2025 | Halla Rempt

Over the past couple of weeks, Timothée Giet has been working on a mock-up tablet and phone friendly UX for Krita. This is a PROTOTYPE, it’s not a working version of Krita. You can’t paint, for instance, or load an image. But you can play with the way the user interface works, and changes depending on orientation and screen size.

The amazing thing, for me, is that unlike our old Krita Sketch, this really looks and feels like Krita, only for mobile touch screens. It’s like this user interface speaks the same language as the desktop interface, krita-ese, I guess you can call it.

Just compare the difference:

Interface of Krita Sketch — Krita Sketch, from 2012

Photo of a hand holding a Fairphone showing of the main interface of Krita for Mobile — The main interface Timothee imagined for Krita.

There’s also a welcome screen:

Photo of a hand holding a Fairphone showing a screen containing image thumbnails

It works really well and feels really good and logical. Now keep in mind that this is a prototype, and integrating Krita’s canvas with this prototype is going to be quite tough for really complicated technical reasons — and the prototype doesn’t connect to any of Krita’s code at all. So don’t go expecting this to show in the Play Store any time soon!

But I am still really excited!!! Timothée Giet is doing a great job here!