At the end of 2015, we announced an important change in how you receive updates to Sketch. After much thought, and with a heavy heart, we moved Sketch away from the Mac App Store.

If you’ve not transitioned your license yet, please see “What steps do I need to take” below. The deadline is March 31st, 2017.

Why Is Sketch Leaving the Mac App Store?

We’ve been considering our options for some time. Over the last year, as we’ve made great progress with Sketch, the customer experience on the Mac App Store hasn’t evolved like its iOS counterpart. We want to continue to be a responsive, approachable, and easily-reached company, and selling Sketch directly allows us to give you a better experience.

We don’t expect this decision to be unanimously popular, but we want to share how we arrived at it. We take your satisfaction and support seriously, and hope you can understand the choice we have made.

There are a number of reasons for Sketch leaving the Mac App Store—many of which in isolation wouldn’t cause us huge concern. However as with all gripes, when compounded they make it hard to justify staying: App Review continues to take at least a week, there are technical limitations imposed by the Mac App Store guidelines (sandboxing and so on) that limit some of the features we want to bring to Sketch, and upgrade pricing remains unavailable.

We should also add that this move is not a knee-jerk reaction to the recent certificate expiration problems that affected so many Mac App Store customers. However, in light of what happened, we can’t help but feel vindicated in our decision that the Mac App Store is not in our customers’ best interests right now.

What steps do I need to take

To migrate to our own version of Sketch (which has advanced much since we left the App Store), please email us your Mac App Store receipt (as either PNG or PDF). Please email it to us using licensing@sketchapp.com.

It should contain your name, email, order number and date of purchase. We will the provide you with a license key to the new version.

If you don’t have your receipt, you may request it here: https://getsupport.apple.com

Note: We will only transition people to our own version until the end of March 2017.

How do I know if I have transitioned my license already?

There are two easy ways to check. If you already have a license key, you’re set to go. Also, if you’re using the latest version, Sketch 42, or a version after 3.4 then you have already transitioned your license.

If you are still on version 3.4, and cannot update to any newer version, then you need to transfer your license to be able to use the newest version of Sketch.

What about my iCloud documents?

iCloud Drive is available to any app on your Mac—regardless of whether the app was downloaded from the Mac App Store. This means that if you store your Sketch documents in iCloud Drive, you can continue to do so.

I want to install Sketch on a new computer

When you move from the Mac App Store, we’ll email your Sketch license to you. When installing Sketch from our website in the future, simply enter this license to unlock Sketch on your new Mac.

Will Sketch ever return to the Mac App Store?

We know there are a great number of people at Apple who care deeply about the Mac, and if things change, we’re not ruling out a return in the longer term.

Thank You

We know that today’s news brings a brief interruption to your workflow, and we’ve done everything we can to ensure the migration is as easy as possible. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s bought Sketch on the Mac App Store, and look forward to bringing you more Sketch updates in the future.

Thank you for using Sketch!