What's the advantage of RoughAnimator over other animation software?
Portability and price! RoughAnimator is the most powerful hand drawn animation program in this price range, and the only one specifically designed to be easy to use on a touch-screen tablet without sacrificing professional-level features. (And it works on desktop computers too.) It can fit into a professional pipeline, to get work done without being stuck at your desk - or you can use it on its own just to doodle and practice your animating skills! As a professional animator myself I'm familiar with the usual complaints about animation software, so I've tried to design the app with those things in mind and make it as intuitive/functional as possible for the needs of animators.

Who are you?
Jacob Kafka, a freelance animator in New York. I always wanted an animation program like this, and no one else was making one, so I decided to try myself and developed RoughAnimator in my spare time. I've since used it for professional work and so can you!

What does RoughAnimator NOT do?
RoughAnimator is NOT meant to be a design/illustration program. You won't find fancy simulated paintbrushes in it for instance, just basic freehand drawing/coloring.

RoughAnimator is NOT a vector program. Everything is bitmap images, made out of pixels, so resolution is limited, and scaling/rotating will result in a loss of quality.

RoughAnimator will NOT do your animation for you. There's no keyframing/tweening, you have to draw every frame yourself.

RoughAnimator is NOT a full compositing/video editing/audio editing suite. You can't make a whole movie just in this app. It's a specialized tool for one part of the process, and there are other better tools for the other parts.

Why is it so cheap?
I'm just one person, and it's selling well enough to support me for the time I spend working on it.

Why is it so expensive?
I'm just one person, and I have bills to pay. Capitalism!

Is it a one time payment or a subscription?
One time. I don't like subscriptions.

If I buy it for one operating system can I use it on another without paying again?
No, sorry. They're separate apps (I have to code everything four times in different programming languages) and must be bought separately.

Are the iOS/Android versions and the Mac/Windows versions the same?
Mostly. Files can be transferred between them, no problem. The interface is slightly different to take advantage of the different operating systems and having a mouse/keyboard vs. a touch screen. Mac/Windows may be able to handle bigger files better since desktop computers tend to be more powerful. However, more of my development attention is focused on the iOS/Android versions (due to higher demand), so those tend to be more polished - it takes me longer to get the newest improvements ported to the Mac/Windows versions.

How can I transfer projects to/from my iPad?
You can get to the project files through the Files app (they're in a "RoughAnimator" folder), or on the desktop through Finder (or before Catalina, through iTunes).

How can I transfer projects to/from my Android device?
On Android 10 and earlier, the files are in a "RoughAnimator" folder in your external storage.

On Android 11 and above the folder is harder to find. I think the location is this, or something like this: /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.weirdhat.roughanimator/files But, Android won't give apps other than RoughAnimator permission to access that folder. I believe though that you can get to it from your PC with the Android device plugged into it. There may also be other workarounds like this.

Can I use it on a phone?
Yes, but the interface could seem cramped and obviously you'll have less space to draw than on a tablet. Your mileage may vary. A large phone with a stylus such as the Samsung Galaxy Note is your best bet. There are settings in the app preferences to hide some of the lesser used buttons, and to adjust the scale of the interface overall, which might help to make it more usable.

Can you increase the resolution limit?
You can override the limit by holding down the Okay button. However I haven't optimized it for higher resolutions. The bigger the images, the slower and less stable the app will be, so be careful with it. It may or may not work okay depending on your device.

Is there a limit on animation length?
There's no hard limit. At some point however depending how much RAM your device has, it may get laggy and then start crashing. Most complaints I've heard of projects that stopped working had a few thousand drawings. Note that's number of drawings, not number of frames or layers, so a 3 minute storyboard animatic might be fine, but 3 minutes fully inbetweened on ones won't. Image resolution makes a big difference to this too (and reducing the "preview resolution" setting helps). Safest thing to do is if you're making a long animation (longer than, say, 20 seconds), split it up into short sections and recombine them with some video editing software afterwards. (That's always a good idea regardless of what software you're using, just to keep things organized and reduce risk of losing a whole project if one file gets corrupted.)

Can you add this feature I want?
Maybe, email me. Don't hold your breath, programming is hard - and I have to prioritize to balance adding new features with keeping the app simple and easy to use - but I'll see what I can do.

Lines don't show up when I draw / lines show up wrong! Help!
Make sure brush Opacity and Flow aren't set to 0.

Check that your brush is set to "draws in front" not "draws inside".

Try turning off pressure sensitivity.

Try turning down the "smoothing" setting on the brush.

On Android/iOS: In the app preferences try turning up "Minimum brush size" and "Minimum brush opacity", these can cause issues on some devices.
On Windows: Try turning on "Use Windows Ink" in the Wacom Tablet Properties, sometimes this will help.

It doesn't work! Help!
Sorry! I do the best I can, but some bugs always slip through. Email me as many details as possible about the problem, and if the app is crashing, use the crash report feature on your device to send me the log of how it happened. I may not be able to respond personally as I get a lot of email, but I will certainly read it and try to fix the problem for the next update.

If a particular project has become corrupted and won't open, send me the file. I may be able to repair it manually, and even if I can't it will help me track down whatever bug caused the problem and keep it from happening in the future.