InVision, the software a service challenger to Adobe’s design dominance, has just released a new version of its mobile app for iOS and is beta-testing new features for Android users as it tries to bring additional functionality to designers on-the-go.
The new app tools feature “studio mirroring” for reviews of new designs directly on mobile devices, so that designers can see design changes to applications made on the desktop display on mobile in real time.
The mirroring feature works by scanning a QR code on a mobile device which lets users view design changes and test user experiences immediately.
The company is also bringing its Freehand support — which allows for collaborative commenting on design prototypes to tablets so teams can comment on the fly, the company said.
The tools will give InVision another arrow in its quiver as it tries to take on other design platforms (notably the 100 pound gorilla known as Adobe) and are a useful addition to a service that’s trying to woo the notoriously fickle design community with an entire toolkit.
As we wrote in May when the company launched its app store:
While collaboration is the bread and butter of InVision’s business, and the only revenue stream for the company, CEO and founder Clark Valberg feels that it isn’t enough to be complementary to the current design tool ecosystem. Which is why InVision launched Studio in late 2017, hoping to take on Adobe and Sketch head-on with its own design tool.
Studio differentiates itself by focusing on the designer’s real-life workflow, which often involves mocking up designs in one app, pulling assets from another, working on animations and transitions in another, and then stitching the whole thing together to share for collaboration across InVision Cloud. Studio aims to bring all those various services into a single product, and a critical piece of that mission is building out an app store and asset store with the services too sticky for InVision to rebuild from Scratch, such as Slack or Atlassian .