Why Every App Feels the Same Now
Every consumer app converged on the same design, and it was no accident. Infinite scroll, engagement-ranked feeds, a recommendation model in the middle of every interaction, and now a generative layer bolted on top. The convergence happened because they are all optimizing the same metric, and there is exactly one shape that metric rewards.
What that costs, and what the alternative looks like. We built one of the alternatives, so read accordingly, but the argument holds whether or not you ever touch our thing.
The Convergence
Open five unrelated apps and count the shared features. A vertical feed with no bottom. Ranking by predicted engagement rather than chronology or intent. A recommendation surface where a chronological one used to be. Notifications engineered around variable reward. An AI assistant nobody asked for, wedged into the primary flow.
These apps do entirely different jobs. A drawing app, a grocery app, and a dating app share no functional reason to share an interaction model. They share it because they share an objective function: time on app.
Once that is the metric, the design is essentially solved. Every team optimizing it independently arrives at the same answer, because it is the answer. Not a conspiracy, a gradient. Everyone rolled downhill and landed in the identical valley, looking mildly surprised to find each other there.
What Optimization Costs a Creative Tool
For a creative tool specifically, engagement optimization has an odd side effect: it changes what gets made.
If reach is handed out by predicted engagement, making things becomes a strategy problem. What performs. What the format rewards. What time to post. Every creative decision acquires a distribution question, answered by a system whose preferences you can only guess at.
The result is convergence again, one level down. Not just apps that look alike, work that looks alike. Everyone solving the same optimization problem with the same feedback signal drifts toward the same output.
What gets squeezed out is the work with no strategic case for existing. The drawing that is not good. The idea that will not perform. The thought you would have shared with three people and nobody else, back when sharing with three people was a thing the software let you do.
The Case for Deliberate Under-Optimization
There is an argument that removing these features just builds a worse app. Sometimes it does. Chronological feeds surface less interesting content on average. No recommendations means worse discovery. Fewer notifications means people forget you exist. Real costs, and any honest version of this argument owns them rather than recasting them as secret virtues.
What you get in exchange:
- Making something stops being a strategic act. No reach to optimize, no reason to weigh performance before you start.
- The work stays legible as a human artifact. You can tell a person made it, on purpose, with no model in the middle.
- Attention stays yours. An app with a bottom is an app you finish using.
A genuine trade, not a free upgrade. Worth making for some things and not others. Creative tools sit squarely in the "worth it" column, because the cost of an engagement-optimized creative tool gets paid in what never gets made.
Where Getadoodle Sits
We built it under-optimized on purpose. No feed ranking, no infinite scroll, no generative tools, no AI touching your line. You draw, you post, people see it, some commission you.
That is the whole design, and it costs us things. Discovery is harder without ranking. Engagement metrics are worse without the loops. The correct trade for this particular kind of software.
About the fees, plainly
Creators keep 75% of what they earn. We take 25%.
Nothing is charged until a creator earns: no subscription, no listing fee, no monthly cost, so joining carries no risk. That cut covers payment handling, moderation, and the discovery that brings a buyer to a creator in the first place, the part subscription platforms famously do not provide. Against a gallery's standard 50%, it is half.
The Honest Version of the Claim
Is this the last app not ruined by an algorithm? No. Obviously not. There are plenty of small, deliberate, well-made tools out there, and claiming otherwise is the kind of line that gets a post ratioed by people cheerfully naming twelve of them.
What is true is narrower and more interesting: almost nothing at scale is built this way anymore, because the economics do not support it. Under-optimized software does not grow like optimized software. That is the actual story, not that we are uniquely virtuous, but that this design got priced out of the mainstream, and what remains of it is small on purpose.
If you want to draw something with nothing in the way, that still exists. It is just not where the money went.