Is drawing on a tablet good for kids?
Drawing on a tablet is closer to drawing on paper than to watching video: the child produces something rather than receiving it, and they choose when it ends. It does not replace paper for fine-motor development, but it is not the same activity as passive screen time either.
The distinction that matters
The useful question is not how many minutes a screen is on, but whether the child is making a decision every few seconds. Video and autoplay feeds decide for them. A drawing app does not — nothing moves until the child moves it, and the session ends when they decide the picture is done.
That difference also shows up in how a session ends. Children stop drawing on their own. They rarely stop a video on their own, and that is a property of the format rather than of the child.
What paper still does better
Pencil pressure, resistance, and the fine-motor control that comes from an actual grip. A tablet stylus is lighter and glides, so it does not build the hand strength that writing later depends on. Neither replaces the other; children who draw on a tablet generally draw more on paper too, because they have more things they know how to draw.
A practical rule
Treat a drawing app as an activity with an end, not as a way to fill time. One or two finished drawings and then away. The natural stopping point is already built into the task, which is exactly what most screen activities lack.
Where Draw Along fits
Draw Along is deliberately finite: each drawing has a fixed number of steps, it ends with a finished picture, and there is no feed, no streak, no daily reward, and nothing that starts playing on its own. The app has no ads and works with the tablet offline.