Why Dabble has no stickers, stamps or rewards

Dabble has twelve markers, a thickness slider, a light canvas, a dark canvas, a trash button and a menu that takes two seconds to open. That’s the whole drawing screen. There are no stickers, no stamps, no colouring pages, no sound effects, no stars, no streaks and no confetti. People sometimes ask whether that’s a version 1.0 thing and whether the rest is coming. It isn’t. Here’s why.

What is a drawing app for?

A drawing app for a two-year-old has one job: let the child make a mark and see it appear. That’s what crayons do. It’s what finger paint does. It’s what a stick in the sand does. The child moves, the world changes, and the child notices. Repeat for an hour.

Everything a developer adds on top of that is a bet that the child needs more. We don’t think a toddler does. A two-year-old is at the stage where scribbling itself is the work: learning to steer a line, to close a circle, to choose the blue one on purpose. The fewer things between the hand and the mark, the more of that practice happens.

So we started with everything a kids’ drawing app usually has, and took things out until removing one more would stop it being a drawing app.

Why no stickers or stamps?

Stickers are the first thing to go, and the hardest to leave out, because kids love them.

That’s the problem. Tap a button and a perfect dinosaur appears. Tap again, a rainbow. Compared with that, a wobbly green scribble looks like a lot of effort for a worse result, and toddlers are not stupid. Once a child finds the sticker tray, the pen stops being used. We’ve watched it happen in other apps within a minute.

Colouring pages have a gentler version of the same effect. The picture already exists; the child’s job is to stay inside somebody else’s lines. That’s a fine activity at four. At two, it skips the part where the child invents the picture.

The drawings a toddler makes in Dabble are worse-looking than a sticker scene, and they’re entirely theirs. We’ll take that trade every time.

Why no rewards, stars or confetti?

Reward animations are retention mechanics. They exist to make the app the thing a child wants to come back to, which is a reasonable goal for a game company and the wrong goal for a toddler’s drawing app.

A star for every drawing teaches a two-year-old to draw for the star. Confetti when a page is “finished” teaches them that drawings finish, when to a toddler a drawing is never finished; it just gets drawn over. Streaks teach them to open the app every day. None of this helps the child draw, and all of it makes stopping harder for the parent.

In Dabble, finishing a drawing does nothing. It saves itself quietly, gets a silly name like “Sparkly Dino,” and waits in the gallery. The reward is the drawing.

Why no sound?

Sound on every tap trains tapping for the sound. Background music is noise in a car, and a problem at bedtime. The places parents told us they used a drawing app most, night drives, planes and the last ten minutes before lights-out, are the places where silence is the feature. Dabble makes no sound at all.

Why so few tools?

Twelve markers and one slider. No brushes, no layers, no fill bucket, no shapes, no text, no glitter.

Every tool on the screen is something a toddler will tap, and most tools do something confusing when tapped by someone who can’t read. A fill bucket turns the whole canvas pink. A layer button makes the drawing vanish. A shape tool draws a perfect circle, which is lovely until the child wonders why their own circles aren’t.

Twelve colours is enough to want a particular one. One slider is enough to make a fat line or a thin one. That covers everything a two- to four-year-old does with real markers, and nothing they don’t.

Why does leaving the canvas take two seconds?

Toddlers tap everything, and if the way out of the canvas is a tap, they’ll find it in under a minute and be in your Settings in two. So the one button on Dabble’s screen that isn’t about drawing, the menu, needs a two-second hold. A quick tap just shows a hint. A real hold fills a pink ring and opens the menu, where a parent can rename, save, share or flip to dark mode.

Sharing, buying and every link out of the app sit behind a parent gate as well: a quick multiplication question a toddler can’t answer. Your child gets the canvas. You get the settings. (Guided Access on the iPad is still worth turning on; it’s belt and braces.)

Why dark mode?

The dark canvas is the one thing we added rather than removed, and it’s the reason the app exists. Flip the canvas to black and the markers glow. It keeps the back seat dark on a night drive, it’s calmer before bed, and children who’ve “done” drawing on white paper come back to it. There’s a whole article on why a dark canvas is calmer at bedtime.

What about Dabble Pro, then?

Dabble is free, with no ads, and we’d like it to stay that way, which means something has to pay for it. That something is Dabble Pro: an optional upgrade that removes the limits on saved canvases, clearing, deleting and sharing. Nothing on the canvas itself is behind it. Every marker, both modes and the child-lock are free for everyone.

The Pro screen only appears when a parent runs into a limit, and it sits behind the parent gate like everything else that costs money or leaves the app. A toddler should never see it.

What’s coming, and what isn’t

New marker colours, small improvements to how strokes feel, and whatever makes the canvas better are the kind of thing that gets added. Stickers, stamps, colouring pages, rewards and sound are not, no matter how often they’re requested. If that’s what your child needs, there are hundreds of apps that do it well, and Dabble isn’t trying to be one of them.

It’s trying to be a fresh stack of paper and a new set of markers, in the dark, with the lid on.