Snippet: Paper at 10 ☇

Andy Allen:

Today marks 10 years since that night we first released the Paper app. I haven’t written much about Paper, because, honestly, I’m not sure how to. How do you fit a decade-long mission into a tweet thread? Like many creative tensions, I’m often caught between opposing feelings of having nothing to say and also too much to know where to begin.

Origin stories in tech are often about as true as the comic variety—mythologized to create an allure of genius and clean up any of the messy legal bits. In honor of its 10 years, I thought it’d be fun to pull back the curtain and share a few of the details of how Paper came to be.

Even before the Apple Pencil and large iPad Pro, Paper was one of those apps that felt like it could only exist on the iPad, not the Mac or iPhone. Although the sale to WeTransfer felt weird, it’s one of the rare instances where an app has changed hands and generally still works the same today as it did ten years ago.