Earlier this spring I started messing around with a drawing feature for Together. Two people share a small canvas. You scribble something, your partner sees it. That's it.
Then I spent the better part of two months on it.
Why doodles
Most of how my girlfriend and I communicate during the day is text and photos. Text is fast but low-resolution emotionally. "Miss you" is sweet, but you've sent it 400 times. Photos take more effort - you have to be doing something photogenic, and the act of taking a photo is itself a little performative.
A doodle is different. Messy, ten seconds, no filter, no caption. You just scribble a thing and send it. There's something about a quick drawing that lands differently than a sentence.
So I figured this should just be in Together.
The first version was bad
I built a draft in a weekend. It worked, and it was embarrassing. The pen had one weight. The eraser was the system "backspace" icon. The colors were six garish presets. There was no zoom. The toolbar wrapped to two rows on smaller phones.
I shipped that to myself and tried to actually use it. Within a day I had a list of about thirty things that bothered me. That list is essentially what the next two months were.
The toolbar nobody will notice
Here's the kind of thing I spent days on.
There are eight tools in the toolbar. Pen, marker, highlighter, eraser, undo, redo, color, text. On a regular iPhone they fit fine. On an iPhone 12 mini, the smallest screen we still support, they wrapped to a second row.
This sounds like a non-issue. It is, until you actually use the app. A two-row toolbar makes the canvas feel cramped. It moves the buttons out of thumb reach. So I shrunk every button, tightened the spacing, and drew a custom ink-eraser icon because the default one looked wrong at the smaller size. On Android I had to redo the math entirely.
It's invisible to anyone who hasn't seen the broken version. But the alternative was the canvas just feeling slightly off, and I couldn't let that go.
The user who emailed me
A few weeks in, someone emailed a screenshot. Their toolbar was clipping off the edge of the canvas. They had Display Zoom turned on, plus Button Shapes for accessibility. Two settings I'd never enabled myself. My layout math fell apart.
I fixed it, then spent an evening turning on every accessibility setting I'd ignored and walking through the whole app. The lesson, again: I keep designing for my own phone. My phone isn't most phones.
Why it was worth it
I could have shipped the first ugly version in a weekend and called it done. But the whole point of Together is that it's small and the small things are the entire experience. A drawing feature that almost works isn't actually a drawing feature. It's friction. People use it twice and forget about it.
I'd rather spend two months making something good and have it be one of those things people use every week, than ship a check-the-box version and have it sit there unused.
These days my girlfriend and I send each other doodles all the time. Quick stupid sketches. A heart. Cookies we shared. Tulips she keeps drawing. It's become part of how we talk.
That, more than anything, is what I was building. Not the feature. The little ritual.
Try it
Doodles is live in Together on iOS and Android. Free, no subscription required. Open the app, hit the doodles tab, and scribble something to your person.
