Software for Android

Krita is intended for digital painting, but its pixel brush presets, indexed color filter and animation timeline make it a capable pixel art tool once configured.

DefleMask targets the Mega Drive, Game Boy, NES, PC Engine, Master System, C64 and more, exporting files that run on real hardware.

Goxel is a free voxel editor with layers, a procedural renderer and unlimited scene size, available on every platform.

GrafX2 was made for DOS and has been ported everywhere since. It has tools no other program does, constraints for retro platforms, and an antiquated interface.

LÖVE is a small, well documented Lua framework with nearest-neighbour filtering and canvases that make pixel-perfect rendering easy.

MilkyTracker recreates the FastTracker II workflow for XM and MOD files, with sample editing and playback on every platform.

Nanoloop is a music sequencer built around a grid rather than a tracker's note list, which makes it quick to sketch a pattern and hard to write anything conventional. It started as a Game Boy cartridge, where it synthesises sound on the console's own hardware, and also exists as a phone app.

Pixel Studio is a pixel art editor that runs on desktop, phone and tablet with the same project open on all of them. It covers layers, animation with onion skinning, tilesets and palettes, and reads and writes Aseprite files, which makes it a practical way to keep drawing away from a desk.

Pixly is a game-oriented pixel art and animation editor for Android, with the gestures worked out for a touchscreen: two fingers to pan and zoom, three to change the brush size. It covers layers, onion-skinned animation, symmetry, real-time tiling and cloud sync. Its own site is still up and still points at Google Play as the only way to get it, but that listing no longer resolves.

Resprite is a pixel art and animation editor for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, built around a touch interface without losing the tools a desktop editor has: pixel-perfect lines, alpha lock, dithering patterns, custom brushes, gradients and symmetry. It imports and exports GIF, sprite sheets, PSD and APNG.

SunVox combines a pattern tracker with a modular synthesizer, and runs the same on desktops, phones and the web.

TIC-80 is an open source fantasy console in the PICO-8 mould with a larger screen, several scripting languages, and built-in sprite, map, sound and music editors.

dotpict is a phone app for drawing pixel art, built around a community that posts and comments on what it makes. The canvas is deliberately small and the tools are few, which suits short sessions and daily practice more than long production work.

raylib is a no-dependencies C library with bindings for dozens of languages, well suited to small low-resolution games.