# Simple Motion — Animate or rotoscope

> Animate or rotoscope (iPhone/iPad app by Duncan Pollock.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/simple-motion/id6760897792 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Duncan Pollock](https://appshunter.io/developer/1886679285)
- Category: Entertainment, Graphics & Design
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 26.0 · 4 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-03-26
- Data updated: 2026-08-20
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/simple-motion/id6760897792/reviews.md

## What is Simple Motion?

Draw a frame. Draw the next one. Press play.

Simple Motion is a hand-drawn animation studio for iPad and iPhone, built
around the way animation is actually taught — a stack of drawings, a timeline,
and an onion skin to keep it all moving. Everything a student needs is one tap
away, and everything they don't need stays out of the way.

**Draw with Apple Pencil, the way it should feel**

Ink is pure PencilKit, so it's as fast and as natural as writing on paper —
pressure, tilt, double-tap, the lot. Pinch to zoom, twist to rotate the canvas
to a comfortable angle, and tap four fingers to hide every tool and see only
your drawing. Shape recognition turns a wobbly circle into a clean one when you
hold still at the end of a stroke, and the paint fill tool floods an outline in
a single tap.

**See your animation move while you draw it**

Onion skin ghosts the frames either side in red and blue, with independent
counts for before and after. Flip and roll through neighbouring frames to check
your motion — the fundamental animator's flick, now a button. Playback runs at
your project's frame rate with a scrubbable playhead, custom in and out points,
and looped ranges.

**A timeline that works like a real dope sheet**

Pinch the timeline to zoom through five sizes; past the middle rung every cell
shows a thumbnail of the drawing on it. Hold a drawing across frames, build
cycles and ping-pongs from a range, drag frames to reorder them, copy and paste
between layers and projects, and use select mode to act on a batch at once.
Named, coloured markers keep track of beats and dialogue.

**Layers for every kind of animation**

Eight layer types: Drawing, Stop Motion, Image, Video, Audio, Guide, Adjustment
and Annotation. Shoot claymation with the built-in stop-motion camera and its
ghost alignment overlay. Rotoscope over an imported video, sampled on ones,
twos or threes. Add a soundtrack and trim, cut and slide it against the
picture. Drop in a Guide layer for motion arcs and timing charts that appear
over everything and never export. Reorder, hide, lock, merge, duplicate, and
set opacity or blend modes per layer.

**Colour, assets and references, always to hand**

A floating colour palette you can drop anywhere on screen, with a proper
picker, an eyedropper with a magnifier, and your five most recent colours one
tap away. Build a library of reusable drawings — mouth shapes for lip-sync, a
set of hands, a logo — stored with the project and stamped onto the canvas as
real, editable ink. Move a whole library between projects as a single file.
Pin a reference photo in a floating panel, zoom into a detail, and pick colours
straight off it.

**Made for a classroom**

Organise the gallery into folders by class or assignment, search across all of
them at once, and sort by name or by what was opened last. Save any project as
a template, hand it out, and every student who taps it starts a fresh copy with
the canvas size, frame rate and guide layers already set — the original is
never drawn on. Back up a project to a single file to collect, archive or move
between iPads.

**Share it however you need**

Export an animated GIF, an MP4 with its soundtrack, a sprite sheet, a single
PNG frame, or a numbered image sequence with your choice of naming convention.
Stills and sequences can keep a transparent background for use elsewhere. Every
export renders at full resolution, whatever quality you preview at.

**Nothing is ever lost**

Every action that changes a drawing can be undone, several steps back, from the
toolbar or the snackbar that appears the moment something is deleted. Two
fingers to undo, three to redo, straight on the canvas.

Simple Motion. Twelve drawings and an idea is all it takes.


## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 2.4 — 2026-08-19

This update is all about improving the user experience on iPhone, particularly for stop motion capture. 
It also sets the ground work for some exciting UI improvements coming soon.

### 2.3 — 2026-08-10

Version 2.3 brings some further UI improvements to make creating animations much easier and more intuitive.
-Gallery view of projects now allows for folders to hold projects. The folders are implemented like a tag system so you can only show projects tagged with one specific name.
-The floating tool pill has some icon clarity. Small labels for the buttons can be enabled in the app settings.
-Layers, colour palette and the asset library can now be launched from a side bar on the right side of the screen.
- Adding new layer types to the timeline is now in a more intuitive place (the bottom right corner of the timeline) instead of being buried in the layer stack.
- The timeline will now show you the frame number you are on and the time in seconds for your animation
- Pinching to zoom the timeline will show thumbnails of the frames when the frames become big enough.
- Long tap the frame number to add a marker to a frame.

### 2.2 — 2026-08-03

- Paint Fill tool has been improved so it doesn't spill colour over the boundary of the lasso area.
-reference photo panel
- asset library improvements (pinch to zoom, layer reordering)
- Improved the floating colour palette so it works the same as my other app Simple Sketchbook. This includes a custom colour selector and the ability to 'float' the colour selector as a panel over the canvas.
-Asset libraries are now project-specific (no previous library will be lost)
-asset libraries can now be exported and imported into different projects
-when you add an asset to the canvas it will automatically be selected to transform before being flattened to the canvas.
-Canvas rotation is back. You can now pinch to zoom and rotate the canvas.

### 2.1 — 2026-07-28

Lots of new quality of life features to make Simple Motion 2.0 a better animation tool.
Now when you add a new drawing layer you get the option to add it as an empty layer or a layer filled with blank frames.
A new Help sheet has been designed and included on the gallery screen. Click the ? in the top right corner to open it.
Frame clipboard so you can now copy and paste frames, even between projects.
Undo now works in the timeline.
A new settings screen
UI updates to reduce the clutter in the timeline area.
A new two-finger long tap on the canvas to open a quick menu (Customisable actions is on the roadmap)
Export frames as images (which includes exporting only the timeline range marked as in and out)
Timeline markers (really good for lip syncing and specific actions)
Gallery UI update to add folders.
Mark an animation project as a template so you can create a practice file and keep working on new versions to hone your skills.

Lots of bugs have been squashed.

more coming soon.

### 2.0 — 2026-07-19

Lots of new features in this update to try to make Simple Motion a more effective little animation tool, without over-complicating things.
2.0 includes:
-stroke transform and rotation
-stroke grouping
-new Asset library to help with lip syncing
-brand new custom colour palette and picker
-full screen mode with four finger tap so you can focus on the canvas
-import Audio clips onto a specific audio layer. Cutting and trimming audio also possible in the timeline.
-add a Guide layer to assist with motion paths
-add an adjustment layers (curves) for stop motion layers
-custom paint fill tool in the tool picker (based on the lasso tool) is an easy way to fill in large areas of colour

There are some UI improvements coming in the next update

## Apps similar to Simple Motion

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| [Crown Resorts](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/crown-resorts/id893896655) | — | Free | Entertainment |
| [Game Emulator - RePlay](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/game-emulator-replay/id6502828239) | 4.7 (1,061) | Free | Entertainment |
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## More apps by Duncan Pollock

- [Simple Sketchbook](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/simple-sketchbook/id6761445903)

All apps by Duncan Pollock: https://appshunter.io/developer/1886679285

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-20.*