Flipbook vs Simple Motion
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Flipbook
Create frame-by-frame animations with intuitive drawing tools and onion skinning. Export your creations as GIFs or PNGs, all while maintaining complete privacy and offline functionality.
- Frame-by-frame drawing
- Onion skinning preview
- Adjustable playback speed
- Export as GIF/PNG
- Offline functionality
- Multiple project support
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Turn your device into a portable flipbook animation studio. Draw frame by frame with Apple Pencil or your finger, preview with onion skinning and loop playback, then share your creations — fully offline, no account needed. Free to download. No ads. No tracking — ever. ▸ DRAW FRAME BY FRAME Use the full PencilKit canvas with pens, pencils, markers, and erasers. Each frame is your canvas — draw, erase, and refine until it's perfect. ▸ ONION SKINNING See the previous frame as a ghost overlay while you draw. Free includes onion skin at the default opacity; Pro adjusts opacity from 5% to 50%. ▸ REFERENCE IMAGES (Pro) Import a reference image and overlay it on your canvas. Pan, zoom, rotate, and adjust opacity — ideal for tracing, rotoscoping, or photo references. ▸ FRAME MANAGEMENT Add, duplicate, reorder, and clear frames. Set a background color on any frame. Free projects support up to 12 frames; Pro unlocks up to 256 frames. ▸ SMOOTH PLAYBACK Play your animation at adjustable frame rates from 1 to 24 FPS with loop preview. ▸ MULTIPLE PROJECTS Free: up to 2 animation projects (existing projects stay editable). Pro removes the project cap. ▸ EXPORTS Free: animated GIF and all-frames PNG — no watermarks. Pro adds MP4 video and multi-page PDF. ▸ HOME SCREEN WIDGET (Pro) Add a Flipbook widget to your home screen to see your latest animation at a glance. ▸ BACKUP & RESTORE (Pro) Export and restore your full .flipbook archive. ▸ FULLY OFFLINE & PRIVATE No account. No cloud. No ads. All your drawings and animations stay on your device only. ▸ TRY FREE Complete a real animation job on Free — draw, preview with onion skin, and export GIF or all-frames PNG without watermarks. ▸ PRO UNLOCKS THE STUDIO Large and XL canvas, extended frame capacity, adjustable onion skin, reference images, MP4/PDF export, backup, and Home Screen widget. Monthly, annual, or lifetime. Flipbook is designed for creators who value simplicity and privacy. Download now and start animating. Have feedback? Reach us at support@can.bi Privacy Policy: https://canbi.notion.site/Privacy-Policy-2f76cac95bdb82f2b23f01be456d1f4f Terms of Use (EULA): https://canbi.notion.site/Terms-of-Service-abb6cac95bdb83debe910153019d3f47
Simple Motion
Create hand-drawn animations with a focus on traditional animation techniques. Features include a drawing canvas, timeline, onion skinning, and multiple layer types for various animation styles. Ideal for learning and creating animations on mobile devices.
- Hand-drawn animation tools
- Onion skinning for frame-by-frame animation
- Timeline with frame manipulation
- Multiple layer types (drawing, stop motion, video, audio)
- Apple Pencil support with pressure and tilt
- Shape recognition and paint fill
- Reference image/video pinning
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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 or video 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. Twelve drawings and an idea is all it takes.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Flipbook at Free against Simple Motion's $2.99. Flipbook also leads on ratings volume (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.0). Simple Motion's advantage is rating (5.0 vs 4.0). On update cadence, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Flipbook is free to download; Simple Motion costs $2.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Simple Motion holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.0. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 3 and 1 respectively.
Flipbook ships an update every 9 days, Simple Motion every 8 days. The most recent releases landed on October 5, 2026 and September 29, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Flipbook | Simple Motion |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $2.99 |
| Rating | 4.0 (3 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 9 days | Every 8 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Freemium | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 17 MB | 4 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Can Bi | Duncan Pollock |
Customer experience
Flipbook
Simple Motion
In-app purchases
Flipbook
No in-app purchases
Simple Motion
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Flipbook free?
Is Simple Motion free?
Which has better reviews, Flipbook or Simple Motion?
Do Flipbook or Simple Motion have ads?
Which is updated more often, Flipbook or Simple Motion?
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