Krita For Android Beta; Feedback and Bugs

Develop Mobile & Tablets platform
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I made a new thread because the last one’s title no longer fit the contents of the thread.

I’ve done some more messing around with Krita on Android, simply because this is an exciting thing for me. I took notes as I made some drawings, what was fine/fun, and what was made less fun. Hopefully this could be a good thread dedicated to people posting their issues, workarounds, and fixes.

Pros:

-Not tied to a desk/mouse/keyboard
-My tablet finally has real software for it, so it’s not effectively a “crappy mobile game/netflix” machine
-Everything that makes Krita great, but on the go. This is huge, guys!

Cons/Issues/Bugs:

(Listed as issue first, then possible solutions I thought of)

Issue: Working with limited real estate. Dockers take up a lot of space.

Possible Fix: The UI redesign thread came up with plenty of ideas to alleviate this, of which I see the most potential in the option to minimize dockers and bring them back by tapping their icon.

Issue: Many common functions usually done via keyboard are now only accessible via customizing the top toolbars, resulting in a mess of icons and text across the top of the screen. Some of the heavily used options (undo/redo especially) are tedious to reach for over and over.

Possible Fix: In other Android paint applications, I’ve noticed the use of 2-finger tap to undo, and 3-finger to redo. If that’s possible in Krita that would be a huge Quality of Life boost.

This could also be helped by the UI redesign thread’s ideas. I like the idea of seeing more of the toolbar options in the radial menu, maybe making the Radial menu configurable/customizable.

Issue: The radial menu is slightly broken on my machine. I can select different categories of brushes, but they do not show and cannot be selected.

Issue: When configuring the top Toolbar, the lists cannot be navigated by swiping to scroll up or down.

2 Likes
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I made a mockup of what I was saying regarding the radial menu here.

https://krita-artists.org/t/radial-function-menu/7693/5?u=minstrel

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Hi, I installed the arm32 build on my old galaxy note 10.1 tab, but every time I open Krita, its close, other builds failed to install. Any suggestion.
Thanks.

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I did some looking online, but I’m not sure. Is your Galaxy Note Tab the 2014 edition? My initial hunch is that your device is running an older version of Android that is not compatible. Krita needs at minimum either Android 6 or 7.

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Thanks, is the 2012 version, I force installed android 7 on it, it only supposed to have until android 4. Before the official beta was release I installed a singned version that I found in another post from this page and its worked, but too slow, so its weird that the official version doesnt.

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Hello,
I have a problem with brushes import. The application only gives options to choose the bundle from the folder in which it is installed. That is from the root folder, which cannot be accessed. Finally, it is not possible to import brush bundle.
Another problem is the screen scaling during brush configuration. Unfortunately, some options are cut off and it is not possible to configure them.

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Being completely honest with you, I’m not sure your device has the oomph to run Krita properly. Early 2010s was back when tablet and phone hardware was drastically evolving every few months. I am curious enough to want to troubleshoot that it won’t even open though.

@sh-zam do you have any ideas on this one? Is there a way to find error logs for Krita when it fails to open on Android?

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@sh-zam I just replicated this issues successfully. I downloaded this Brush Pack, and from Settings>Manage Resources>Import Bundle, I was unable to access my Downloads folder to import them. If we’re lucky this might be as simple as a permissions issue.

On the other hand, I think window scaling (to make things like the brush configuration menu fit) is going to be a slightly more long-term issue. If I’m understanding things right, this might not be entirely fixable until the user interface gets a full overhaul.

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This sounds weird, probably you could use Android logcat to get some useful info. Probably it was an older armv5/6, but then I never compiled a binary for it…

Looks like it is using usual file manager not our file picker and opening it in restricted directory. Certainly a bug which I’ve noted for now.

As a temporary solution I was thinking of making all widgets fullscreen for now, so they don’t flow out of the screen. But, I’ve neither discussed this with the team, nor do I know, if it will be usable at all…

1 Like
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Krita works on phones like S8 up to S20 (oder Note-series) with DeX !

On DeX it opens (when forced) on full screen and looks FANTASTIC. But I cannot do anything because I cannot select with the mouse the buttons on the left column (select, pointer, etc etc). The ones with keyboard shortcuts work GREAT!

Please please let Krita (Android) work as on Windows environment (on selected phones, as Samsung with DeX and Huawei with Desktop mode), with standard use of mouse + keyboard! I cannot describe how I feel to have a full Krita-App on DeX as if I was on a fully Windows / Linux pc…

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Just tested it, looks like when you go into DeX mode, Samsung turns mouse events to touch events :frowning:
Which currently is a bit buggy in some widgets. Not something that we’re trying to limit. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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it would be fantastic if that menu worked, I tried some of those actions that have keyboard shortcuts and man… amazing! desktop-like experience!!! And phones with DeX are usually much more powerful (cpu, gpu and amount of ram) than most Android based tablets or even a lot of Chromebooks. So why not coming home, plug the phone and use de editing experience from Krita on our free DeX mode?

On my S9+ and S20 Ultra the speed is amazing, I forgot that I have i7 PC sometimes…

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Hi, thanks for the replies.
I was able to run krita with the latest build, but I have an issue with the finger canvas rotation and zomming, it is too slow, I dont know if its because of the tablet itself or a bug, beside that, everything seems to work well; brushes works really great.
Tab Specs: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2012, quad core arm32 processor, 2 gb ram
Thanks a lot!

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Using Samsung Galaxy Tab S6. Having problems with exporting. Krita shows that the file has been successfully exported and saved as PNG but cannot find file anywhere on my device.

Another issue is with text. Once I’ve inputted the text, closed the file and opened the file again, the text is gone but the vector layer it was supposed to be on still exists.

Additionally, every time I try to draw somewhere, it shows transparent, glitchy pixels instead of what I’m drawing. Not a huge dealbreaker since I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s still a bit annoying.

There’s also an issue with downloading new fonts and importing brush bundles, but I think it’s more of a problem with how file locations are handled in Android rather than a problem with Krita itself.

But overall it’s amazing how advanced and smooth Krita is already, especially considering it’s still a beta.

1 Like
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Update: I am now able to import brush bundles, thankfully.

Unfortunately, seems like the problem with vector objects disappearing is still prevalent. The comic templates, when opened, don’t show any of the panels, and the text disappears once you close the file.

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How did you import the bundle? The download folder is inaccessible from Krita as far as I can tell.

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Oh, I just went Settings > Manage Resources > Import Bundles > Computer > Storage > Emulated > 0 > Download. Ensuring that the brush bundles have been extracted from the .zip files first.

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The only path the krita file explorer gives me is Computer > / > Data. I have no idea how you access Storage…

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Agreed. I cannot even recover anything I have saved, since the save explorer only allows saving in hidden app folders and the android file explorer can’t access that at all. Hence, I cannot use the app because everything I draw will be utterly inaccessable. How come noone else comes forward with this problem? If anyone’s not experiencing this problem, please let me know if you know why you don’t and I do.

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Sorry for coming in here just to complain again. I’ve worked around the whole vector thingy by just making them rasters instead, but I’m still having problems with exporting images.

I’ve found that the .PNG files appear when and only when I restart my device, which I don’t mind doing but gets very annoying considering I make comics and how many pages there are.

Also there seems to be an occasional glitch where when I draw a stroke, nothing appears on the canvas.

Transform tool has a glitch where only the bottom or top right anchor can be manipulated.

Fill tool has a glitch where sometimes it fills the entire canvas with a semi transparent colour, and the threshold setting in tool options often suddenly reverts to “1”.