Procreate Pocket

Procreate Pocket Review: $5.99 Once, and No AI

One Payment, No Subscription, No Account

$5.99 buys the application outright — no in-app purchases, no monthly fee, no sign-in, and artwork that stays on the device rather than syncing to a company server. The brush library alone justifies the price: sets for sketching, inking, drawing, painting, artistic work, calligraphy, airbrushing, textures, charcoals, spray paints and vintage effects, every one of them editable through the same engine that drives the tablet version, with new brushes creatable or importable. Adobe charges a subscription for the equivalent. This charges once and then stops asking, which in 2026 is nearly a political position.

The Desktop Toolset, Compressed to a Phone

Adjustments cover colour, blur, effects and retouching; the colour panel offers disc, classic, harmony, value and palette modes with complementary pairs picked automatically. Transform includes warp meshes and a rotation readout accurate to the degree. Animation Assist adds a frame strip along the bottom of the canvas for frame-by-frame work, and QuickShape straightens a rough circle or line into a clean one. The illustrations in the store screens are finished pieces made at phone scale, which is the honest claim here: this is production software, not a sketchpad with filters.

3.8 Stars, and a Published Position on AI

The App Store shows 3.8 from roughly 13,000 ratings — the weakest paid-app average in this catalogue — while the same store lists it as Editors' Choice and number one in Graphics & Design. The install is 389.6 MB and it needs iOS 15.4.1 or later, which is where the complaints tend to sit: canvas size and performance on older iPhones rather than the toolset itself. Separately, the developer has published a flat position on generative AI — none of it, on the grounds that creativity is made rather than generated, and that the training data behind such models is taken without consent.