I’m very grateful for all the improvements Sketch has made over the last few years. We were especially relieved when Sketch Mirror was finally completely revamped and now reliability connects to the Mac app.
However it seems that the app was somehow overengineered, making it almost unusable as soon as your Sketch file becomes larger. It’s great that the app can download files from Sketch Cloud independently (I mostly see that feature as a last resort of “I really want to preview this thing and my Mac is not available”), but if all I want is to display artboards from my Mac to my phone, why does it need to download everything every time? My file is 120MB and it often takes 1-2 minutes to download and open and sync with the Mac state. Add on top of that that the app doesn’t prevent auto-lock, so often you just lose the state and everything needs to be redownloaded.
When in “Mirror Mode”, why isn’t the Mac app simply sending an image to the iOS app to display? Instead of the iOS app dealing with the entire Sketch file (and only receiving some artboard ID to display from the Mac app I presume).
Thanks for sharing this report. I tested and I haven’t been able to reproduce the problem you mention. I tested with an 86MB (named Working file - January 2024) file and did the following:
Opened it in the iPhone app
Closed it and reopened
Closed the app, reopened the file
Locked the phone, reopened the file, didn’t lose my artboard
The 86MB download only happened in step 1, in all the other steps, the app opened much faster and I didn’t see the download progress bar.
There’s one scenario where you can get a new download every time, but it’s more rare: if you have an old file, it may need a format update. In this case, the iPhone app will ask you if you want to update it or not. If you choose not to update, it will download again the whole file when you open it and choose not to update, but that’s the only known scenario.
Of course, I could be missing something. Here’s a quick video that shows a download from a file I hadn’t opened in my phone compared to the file I tested with, you’ll see it opens quite fast:
Here’s also the file I downloaded in the first video after reopening it
About auto-lock, we’re aware of this and know this needs improvement, but after unlocking the phone the selected artboard was still there.
If possible, can you share with us your iOS and Sketch versions to our email productsupport@sketch.com ?
Also, if this problem happens with specific files, a copy of them will be of great help,
Same problem here!!! i have a file with just 3 artboards and it won’t open the mirroring, it keep telling me “opening the document” but the loading bar stuck and nothing is happening.
Seems to be an issue with the wifi because if i switch in data mode than the file will load.
Yes I’ve tested the same file with a stronger WiFi signal and it load perfectly… so the problem is probably related to a weak signal.
Perhaps a “poor signal warning” could be useful to avoid frustration!
Thanks for the update! And you make a great point here, having an alert would be a great addition. I’ll make sure to pass it on to the team and please feel free to share any feedback, idas or take you have for anything Sketch related
Hi again. Thinking about this from a fresher perspective, I think my main gripe is that when all I want is to mirror what’s on my Mac, downloading the entire file on my phone to do that just seems like unnecessary friction.
From the homescreen of the app, there should be a “Mirror” button that just mirrors whatever artboard is currently selected in the mac app, as opposed to burying that feature inside the file behind a “mirror” button that needs to be toggled every time.
I believe the previous version of the Sketch mobile app (which was called Sketch Mirror for that matter) did precisely this. The new app does a great job at letting you browse all your Sketch Cloud files (which I’m not sure what the use case is), but the mirror function is much worse than it used to be.
I’ve tested the same file with a stronger WiFi signal and it load perfectly… so the problem is probably related to a weak signal.