June 30 Android release issues

The release we pushed on June 30th on Google Play has resulted in serious issues for users on Android 11. They manifested most commonly as crashes and a disconnection between the Sketchbook Gallery and files, causing problems viewing and saving files.

We know that this release has been stressful, frustrating, and deeply angering to everyone affected. Launching Sketchbook and seeing an empty Gallery is not the experience anyone wants to have.

We identified the cause of the problem and have a fix ready to go. That fix will reconnect the Sketchbook Gallery with your files - which are still on your device even if they don’t appear in the Gallery right now - and resolve the permissions errors causing the crashes.

The Google Play store has an approval process for every release, right now our update is waiting for review and as soon as we have it approved we will make it available.

We don’t know how long that will take. We have asked Google to urgently expedite the review, considering the size of the impact on the Sketchbook community.

Thank you to everyone who wrote us notifying us of the issues they experienced, and to those who were willing to quickly jump in and beta test the fix. We really screwed this one up — we’ve learned some painful and valuable lessons in the last 48 hours and promise to do better in the future.

Gallery recovery in the pending Android hotfix (5.2.5)