Pixel Pals
Pixel Pals is a friendly pixel art editor for Android and desktop. It has big buttons with words under them, a mirror mode, stamps, coloring pages, "copy the picture" challenges and simple animation. Everything saves on its own.
The tools are simple enough for a five-year-old and still fun for an older kid who wants to make sprites and little animations.
Pencil, eraser, fill, picker, line, box, circle, move, pattern brush and color swap, each with a big icon and a label.
Draw on one side and it appears on the other, left-right, top-bottom or both. Hearts and butterflies come out perfect.
A 24-color palette plus Rainbow, Pastel, Forest, Ocean and Retro 8-bit sets, a color mixer and a "My Colors" row.
Copy a picture square by square and watch the match score climb (with confetti), or fill in ready-made coloring pages.
Add frames, see the last one faintly with onion skin, and play it back. Export as a GIF or a sprite sheet.
There's no Save button. Drawings save automatically, undo goes back 200 steps, and deleted art waits 30 days in a Recycle Bin.
The same app runs on phones, tablets and computers, in a light or dark theme. Click any picture to make it bigger.
Pixel Pals doesn't talk to the internet at all. The Android app doesn't even ask for internet permission.
Free and open source. Pick your device:
The desktop installers aren't code-signed yet, so Windows and macOS may show a warning the first time. The release notes explain how to open them.
# Or build it yourself (JDK 21) git clone https://github.com/rsantacroce/pixel-pals.git cd pixel-pals # Run on desktop ./gradlew :desktopApp:run # Build the Android app ./gradlew :androidApp:assembleDebug