ArmorPaint 4+

Great potential, unusable at the moment

Review stats:

Review date: 2023.07.29

App usage time: 2-3 hours

Hardware: iPad Air 5 (M1 chip)

There is great potential in the app, but at its current state, it is unusable.

It is very junky, but it was expected from an open source desktop app iPad port. There are some bugs (for example: decal preview not showing, only when using finger instead of pencil, but even then not every time), but they can be forgiven.

I have 2 major concerns about the app. The most outstanding, that makes it unusable is the constant crashes. It crashes at seemingly random times. My iPad is not a Pro, but having the M1 chip, it shouldn't be a problem. When it crashes, the project is not saved of course, but it can cause my project to be completely lost. Since saving the project to a custom folder is not an option, I have basically no control over my projects existence. And it is veeeery frustrating. Losing hours of work to a random crash. I am aware of the auto save function, but I have encountered a crash, after which I was unable to load my project (the app crashed immediately) and since I can't find the project file (I guess it was hidden), my work was lost for good. If I don't export my textures every so often, or use a third party shell app to access the hidden folders (if there are any), my work can be trashed at any time. This makes the app completely unreliable and unusable at the moment.

My second concern is that this app is not an iPad optimized port. It is desktop app thrown onto the iPad. Every function speaks for a mouse and a keyboard, my fingers act like mouse and my pencil only as a left-click. The pencil settings take about 30 minutes of tweaking before it can be used, or it feels near natural. And what is really weird, is that even tho the tooltips tell you the keyboard shortcuts, they just don't work. Or at least not with the iPad Magic Keyboard.

Despite the mentioned problems, there is huge potential in the app. It has a good interface and a very nice material node editor. If the pencil optimization is fixed, it can be a really good opportunity for 3D modelers to move the texturing workflow to the iPad. But currently, the problems mentioned above make the app plain unusable. I have refunded my purchase, but I am keeping a close eye on the project, since the last patch came out a week ago, I have faith in the developers. But until at least the crashes and the project saving options are fixed, I won't buy the app again.

(I'll edit my review if the problems are fixed)