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Freeform – Apple’s collaborative whiteboard app | iPadOS 17 Guide

Imagine the Notes app, souped up with a huge, flexible canvas and some additional drawing tools. Then throw in the ability to work on a document live alongside your friends or colleagues, scribbling notes as you collectively brainstorm ideas. That’s Freeform, a virtual whiteboard app made by Apple.

It’s a great way to collaborate remotely, and unlike existing apps that do something similar, it’s completely free and simple enough that you can pick it up in seconds. You can easily share a document by text or over FaceTime.

You can add text, links, images, and more with the press of a button. We particularly like that you can drop a virtual sticky note to leave comments, and there’s a huge built-in library of shapes available. Apple’s familiar bank of simple drawing tools is here, which won’t win you any art prizes but is plenty to give your notes and diagrams some variance.

It’s a universal app that runs seamlessly across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, but it’s clearly designed for use on the latter with an Apple Pencil in tow, and scribbling ideas with that setup is extremely satisfying. The markup tools will be familiar to Notes users, and the app overall is pretty intuitive. Give it a try!