Tux Paint

Tux Paint is, in its own words, “a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6)”, and it “is used in schools around the world as a computer literacy drawing activity.” Bill Kendrick released the first version in 2002; it is still developed by a team of volunteers, and the Android port is built by Pere Pujal i Carabantes, who also publishes it on F-Droid.

What children can do with it

• Paint, draw lines and shapes, write text and erase, with large buttons and a sound effect for each action.
• Stamps: the Android version includes the stamp collection, nearly a thousand pictures in groups such as animals, food, vehicles, town, plants, space, sports, people and military, many of them with a spoken description in several languages.
• Magic tools, the special effects: the project counts “over 90 tools”, from rainbows and bricks to filters that warp the picture. New in 0.9.35 are tools that emit hearts, sparkles and stars.
• Starters and templates: “Starters” behave “like a page from a coloring book”; templates give a background picture to draw on. The app has 54 starters and 22 templates.
• Saving: the Save button doesn’t ask for a file name; it “will simply save the picture, and play a ‘camera shutter’ sound effect.”
• Printing goes through Android’s own print service.

Tux Paint Config, for parents and teachers

The APK installs a second icon, Tux Paint Config, which holds the settings, separate from the drawing program so children don’t change them by accident. Among them:

• Complexity: Advanced, Beginner or Novice. Novice, “for first-time Tux Paint users, users inexperienced with computers, or those with special accessibility needs”, hides some Magic tools.
• Language: about 130 translations.
• Sound on or off, autosave when quitting, whether a new drawing starts blank or from the last one, and what happens when you save over a picture.
• Printing on or off, with an optional delay between prints.
• Screen orientation, button size, the on-screen keyboard layout, and whether stamps can be rotated.

What it connects to

Nothing. The app has no internet permission, and the project states that “It does not utilize networking, and hence does not contain in-app advertising or in-app purchases, nor does it do any kind of user tracking.” Its privacy policy says the official releases “do not communicate any information online; they have no networking functionality.”

The other permissions: storage, requested at start on Android 6 to 11 so that drawings can be saved, and Bluetooth, which comes from the SDL game library’s controller support and is optional (see the questions below).

Good to know

• The first start can be slow. The project explains that the first time, “it may take a minute or more to respond” while the font system builds a cache; later starts are faster.
• Export what you want to keep. Drawings are stored in the app’s own folder; use Export in the Open dialog to copy them to Pictures/TuxPaint.
• A few desktop features differ. SVG stamps are left out of the Android version: “SVG support disabled as the old rsvg version used in previous builds crashed on some stamps.” The settings live in Tux Paint Config rather than a separate program.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of version 0.9.35, compiled from the project’s source code, with the stamp collection downloaded at build time, and signed with F-Droid’s key. The project also offers its own APK download, signed differently, and the separate Google Play app.
• The 153.3 MB file is for 64-bit ARM devices only and needs Android 5.0 or later. Most of its size is the stamps and their sounds. Our scan found no trackers.
• Tux Paint is licensed under the GPL-2.0 or later. The stamp collection is GPL-2.0 as a whole, with individual pictures and sounds under other licences, among them public domain, Creative Commons and the GFDL, listed in the collection’s credits.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.