Writing Apps for iPhone: Nine Compared on Price and Goals

If you are writing something long on an iPhone and it has a due date, the feature that matters most is whether the app knows your word goal. Of the nine writing apps compared here, only Ulysses takes a target and a deadline and works out how many words you need each day, and it costs $39.99 a year in the US App Store. Scrivener does word and session targets for a one-time $23.99, but its iPhone version has not been updated since September 2023. Pages and Google Docs are free and count words well, yet neither lets you set a goal at all.

I went into this comparison expecting the editors to differ most, and they hardly do. All nine open to a clean page with a keyboard underneath. The differences I kept writing down while going through the App Store listings on October 12, 2026 were about goals, syncing, export and price. Those four things also decide which app suits a novel with a contract date, a thesis with a word limit or a weekly newsletter, so the nine apps are sorted by job first and by feature second.

Pick the job first, then the app

A novel or nonfiction book with a deadline, written on Apple devices only, points to Ulysses. It converts the deadline into a daily quota and keeps a session history you can export. If you already draft that book in Scrivener on a Mac or a Windows PC, Scrivener for iOS opens the same projects, as long as you sync through Dropbox and accept an app that no longer gets updates.

A thesis or dissertation is a different case, because the limit usually counts words or characters and nobody grades the editor. Pages keeps a live count on screen and costs nothing, and you can export a .docx file at the end if your department wants one. When an advisor or co-author needs to read along, Google Docs is the easier choice, since everyone can comment without buying anything.

For blog posts, newsletters and other short pieces I would pick between iA Writer and Bear. iA Writer suits you if you prefer a single payment, and Bear makes sense if your notes already live there. Drafts is built for catching ideas on the go, and Obsidian is the alternative if you want that text in plain files you control.

If you switch between a Mac and an iPhone, check what the second device costs before you commit. Ulysses covers both in one subscription, Pages is free on both, and iA Writer is sold separately for each platform. For turning a department’s word limit into a daily figure, How Many Words a Day Does a Dissertation Need? works through the numbers.

How much slower you type with your thumbs

The phone keyboard sets a ceiling on all of these apps, and it is lower than it feels. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland, the University of Cambridge and ETH Zurich collected typing samples from 37,370 volunteers who copied 15 sentences each on their own phones. They averaged 36.2 words per minute, with two-thumb typists at 38.0 and one-finger typists at 29.2 (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019).

The same group had earlier run the same kind of test on physical keyboards with 168,960 people, who averaged 51.6 words per minute (Dhakal et al., CHI 2018). The authors put the gap at about 15 words per minute.

Translated into a writing day, the two averages work out like this.

• A thousand words take about 28 minutes of pure typing on a phone and about 19 minutes on a keyboard.

• Typing with one finger instead of two thumbs stretches those 28 minutes to about 34.

• For an 80,000-word novel, the difference adds up to roughly 37 hours against 26, or eleven extra hours.

Both studies measured copying, so the time you spend deciding what to say is not in these numbers, and for most writers that is the bigger share. The volunteers also came through a typing-test website. They were 24 years old on average, 65 percent were women and 47 percent were from the US, and the authors themselves call the sample unrepresentative. I found no retraction or correction notice for either paper.

For choosing an app, the figures suggest using the iPhone for short sessions, such as a scene on the train or a paragraph between meetings, and pairing it with a Bluetooth keyboard if you plan longer stretches. It also means syncing matters more than any feature that exists only on the phone, since most people finish the draft on a computer.

The two apps that know your word goal

Ulysses lets you attach a goal to a single sheet, a group of sheets or a whole project. You can count characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, pages or estimated reading time, and set the goal as “at least”, “at most” or “about”. Turn on a deadline for a project goal and, in the words of the Ulysses help pages, the app “will automatically calculate how much you need to write each day to stay on track.” You choose your writing days once, and they apply to every goal with a deadline.

Groups and projects also get a history. A session starts when you begin typing and ends at midnight, and the full record can be exported as a CSV file, which is useful if you want to chart your own pace in a spreadsheet. The help pages describe the floating goal display, which you drag out next to your text, only for the Mac.

Scrivener’s App Store listing promises word and character targets, and its version notes mention session targets, meaning a goal for a single writing day. That covers the basics. Scrivener does not do the arithmetic Ulysses does, so on the phone a deadline stays your own calculation. A writing goal calculator handles that in a few seconds if you go this route.

What a one-time purchase gets you

Scrivener for iOS costs $23.99 once, the same price Literature & Latte lists in its own store. It compiles a project into a single document and exports to Word, RTF, PDF, Final Draft or plain text. Syncing with the Mac and Windows versions runs through Dropbox only, and the listing says plainly that it is not compatible with iCloud.

When I opened the version history, the most recent release was 1.2.4 from September 29, 2023, which fixed a crash when creating a new card on the corkboard. That is more than three years without an update. The app still installs on anything from iOS 12 up, and many reviewers like it, but most of the complaints in the listing are about syncing.

iA Writer is a lean app that is still maintained, with version 8.0.9 released on September 25, 2026. It exports to Word, PDF and HTML and syncs through iCloud. It has no goals, though. Its iPhone stats page lists character, sentence and task counts plus an estimated reading time, for the whole document or a selection. Oddly, the page never lists a word count by name, even though it recommends the stats to writers who are paid per word. It says nothing about targets or a history across days.

Its price confused me as well. The App Store listing showed $19.99 on October 12, 2026, while iA’s own pricing page lists the iPhone and iPad version at $49.99 as a one-time payment. Neither page says whether the lower figure is a sale, so check the store before you buy. iA also charges per platform, and the Mac version is another $49.99.

Ulysses has a one-time option too, and it took me a while to find it. The App Store carries two Ulysses listings. The phone-and-tablet listing, Ulysses Mobile, offers only subscriptions. The listing for Mac, iPhone and iPad adds a perpetual license for $199.99 to its in-app purchases. According to the Ulysses help article on it, it covers the Mac, iPhone and iPad and includes all future updates to the current App Store app, without promising new features forever. Against the $39.99 yearly plan it only pays off in year six, since five years of subscription come to $199.95.

Free apps you may already have

Pages comes with every iPhone and costs nothing. I expected it to be the weak entry, and it turned out to be the only free app here that keeps a word count on screen while you type. Tap the counter and you also get characters with and without spaces, paragraphs and pages, and if you select text the numbers apply only to the selection (Apple Support). Since early 2026 the Pages listing shows in-app purchases of $12.99 a month or $129 a year. That is Apple’s Creator Studio bundle of premium templates, royalty-free photos and graphics and AI image tools, and Apple states that Pages remains free for everyone.

Google Docs is free as well, works offline and opens Word files directly. You get the word count from the three-dot menu under “Word count”, and the Google help page for iPhone describes no count that stays on screen. Headers, footers and footnotes are left out, which matters if your department’s limit includes footnotes.

Microsoft Word is a free download, but the full feature set requires a Microsoft 365 subscription. Microsoft lists Personal at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. If your school or employer already pays for it, the iPhone app costs you nothing extra. Bought only for writing on a phone, it is the most expensive route in this comparison. Microsoft’s Word for iPhone feature list confirms that word count is supported. Its step-by-step article on word count covers only Windows, Mac and the web, so I could not confirm where the count sits on the phone.

Note apps that can hold a manuscript

Bear shows words, characters, paragraphs and estimated reading time in an info panel (Bear FAQ). The free tier works on one device. Syncing between iPhone, iPad and Mac requires Bear Pro at $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, according to the App Store listing. The export FAQ puts Word, PDF and ePub behind Pro as well, while Markdown, plain text and rich text stay free.

Drafts is built as an inbox for text. You type first and send the result to other apps later. Its listing promises fast sync across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, but mentions neither a word count nor export to Word. It talks about copying, sharing and sending text to services like Dropbox instead. Drafts Pro costs $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year.

Obsidian is free for personal use, “without limits” and without sign-up according to its pricing page, and it stores your writing as plain text files. A built-in plugin counts words and characters of the open note, and on mobile the count sits at the top of the right sidebar (Obsidian help). Its own sync service costs $4 a month billed yearly or $5 billed monthly. Goals and a Word export exist only through community plugins, which I did not test for this piece.

Three years of paying

A monthly price means little until you know how long the project runs. Three years is a fair guess for a novel, or for a master’s degree with its thesis. The table multiplies yearly prices by three and monthly prices by 36, and uses the yearly plan wherever one exists, because it is always cheaper.

The cheapest app with real goals is Scrivener at $23.99, and Ulysses on a yearly plan costs about $96 more over the same period. Whether the deadline math and an app that is still being developed are worth that gap is your call. Scrivener saves that money but ties you to Dropbox and to an app that has not changed since 2023. Students and teachers can cut the Ulysses figure to about $66 with the student offer, which costs $10.99 for six months and does not renew automatically (subscription options).

All nine apps side by side

If your phone is older, check the last column. The current versions of Ulysses and Pages require iOS 26, which Apple supports on the iPhone 11 and later and on the second-generation iPhone SE. On an older phone, seven of the nine remain.

When the app matters less than the number

An app decides where the words go. Whether the draft is done on time depends on knowing your daily quota and noticing early when you fall behind. If you are unsure what quota is realistic, How Many Words a Day Should You Write? works through the evidence.

If you draft on a computer and use the phone only for notes, the choice barely matters, as long as the notes reach the main manuscript. And if you run projects in different apps, say a thesis in Word and a novel in Scrivener, none of the nine will give you one total. That needs a writing tracker that counts outside the editor, or one of the methods in How to Track Writing Progress.

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