A 30,000-line Rust GPU engine on Expo, and 120,000 installs without ads

Doodraw is a cross-platform drawing app that creates a live “boiling line” animation effect directly through its brushes, allowing artists to turn quick hand-drawn sketches into shareable animated content without traditional timelines or frame-by-frame work. Founded by Alexis Chân Gridel and illustrator Elodie Mayade, the two-person team built the app around a roughly 30,000-line Rust and wgpu graphics engine while using Expo and React Native for its iOS, iPad, Android, and desktop interface. The app launched on iOS in August 2026, expanded to Android and Windows shortly afterward, and exceeded 120,000 installs across more than 180 countries by October 19 without paid advertising, driven largely by short-form social media content. Its technical approach uses Expo Continuous Native Generation and a custom config plugin to integrate Rust binaries and Swift/Kotlin bridges during prebuilds, avoiding manually maintained native project folders, while EAS Build, Submit, and Update support releases and frequent JavaScript-only updates. The team plans further Android performance work, faster onboarding, language support, seasonal brushes, an Expo SDK 58 upgrade, and improvements to native binary distribution and desktop deployment workflows.

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