# Pen Friend: Handwriting Notes — The notebook that answers > The notebook that answers (iPhone/iPad app by BISHWAS BHANDARI.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/pen-friend-handwriting-notes/id6813871550 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [BISHWAS BHANDARI](https://appshunter.io/developer/6813766129) - Category: Productivity, Education - Price: Free - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 18.0 · 11 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2026-10-07 - Data updated: 2026-11-10 ## What is Pen Friend? You think better with a pen, but the things you need never sit on the page. The answer you're stuck on, the note from last week you can't find, the PDF that lives on your Mac. Every one of them means putting the Pencil down and going somewhere else, and by the time you're back the thought has mostly gone. Pen Friend is a notebook for iPad and iPhone Duo that writes back, and waits until you ask. Write by hand with Apple Pencil, end a line with a question mark and pause, then tap it, and the answer gets written beside your question in handwriting, like someone leaned over and helped. Nothing pops up while you write and nothing rewrites your page. A REAL NOTEBOOK FIRST Most of the time you just want to write, so that part had to feel right. • One smooth canvas that stays crisp however far you zoom • Real pages you turn, not an endless canvas • Grid, lined, dotted or blank paper, in five page sizes • On iPhone Duo it has its own layout, folded or open • Double tap to paste, and export a worklog as a PDF or a page as an image WHEN YOU ASK • Ask on the page, or on tracing paper laid over it so your page stays clean • A worked step for the line you're stuck on • A labelled sketch, or a graph plotted from what you wrote • A page of maths copied as LaTeX, ready for your document WHEN THE PAGES PILE UP Handwritten notes are lovely right up until you need to find one. • Your home is a wall of your pages, whole, with the list one tap away • To do gathers every page with a box still open • Write your search by hand, and it finds worklogs by what they mean, not only the words in them • Every worklog typed up as clean text, headings and all, with a short briefing of where it stands • It sorts your worklogs into folders, and nothing moves until you approve it WITH YOUR MAC • Flick a page and paste it on your Mac, no extra app needed • With the free Pen Friend Companion, drop a PDF or a screenshot on the notch and it lands on your page, mark it up and send it back • Everything you send waits on the Mac in case you want it again ON IPHONE • Every page you wrote, to read, search and file when the iPad stays at home YOURS • No account, no ads, no tracking. It opens straight to a page. • Your notes live on your device, backed up to your own iCloud • Lock a folder, and only Touch ID, Face ID or your passcode opens it The answers, briefings, clean text, search by meaning and sorting are written by Google's Gemini. Settings tells you in plain words what leaves your device. WHY I MADE IT I take notes by hand on an iPad while I work on a Mac, and I built Pen Friend so the page and the Mac could talk. Then grad students wrote asking for PDFs, so 1.2 was mostly that. This one is about the page itself: asking it things, finding things on it, and writing on more than one device. If something's wrong or missing, write to yo@bishwas.net. I read all of it. ## Is Pen Friend safe? Not enough ratings yet to assess Pen Friend. ## Is Pen Friend legit? Pen Friend: Handwriting Notes appears legitimate, with a few gaps. The AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Pen Friend is 65 out of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data. ## Version history (last 4 releases) ### 1.3.1 — 2026-11-09 I made Pen Friend notice your week. Tap Your week on the home screen and you see how many words you actually wrote each day, counted from your own handwriting, which day was your busiest, and where the words went. Step back through weeks, months and years with the arrows or a swipe, tap a day and everything narrows to it. It catches spelling too, the words that came out a little wrong, tap one and the note opens with that word marked in yellow. To-dos in the reading sidebar now have a bell, tap it and the line goes into Reminders, in a list named after the note, with the date if you wrote one. The sidebar shows the due date back to you, and goes green when you tick it off on your phone. The reading sidebar reads more like your page: the boxes you drew around a note, your examples tucked under the to-do they belong to, the P1 you scribbled next to a line. Pen Friend also reads your pages less often and smarter now, a pause in writing no longer re-reads the whole note, so the sidebar is there the moment you open it. On the Mac, a PDF you sent over drags straight into Terminal now, and quitting the Companion tells the iPad. On iPhone, readings no longer start over every time you open a note. ### 1.3 — 2026-11-08 Pen Friend got a bit of a personality in this one. Write a question on the page with Apple Pencil, end it with a question mark and pause, and a dotted line shows up under it. Tap it and the answer gets written right beside your question, by hand, like someone leaned over your shoulder. It works on tracing paper too if you'd rather keep the page clean. Pen Friend now runs on iPhone Duo. Write on it with Apple Pencil like on your iPad, with a layout made for it, folded or open. Your home is a wall of your pages now, whole first pages the way you wrote them, and the list is one tap away if you like it better. To do sits in the sidebar and gathers every page with a box still open, tick the last one and the page leaves on its own. A brand new notebook starts with a few doodles instead of an empty screen. The clean text version of a page got a lot better, it reads every page whole, numbers your pictures and keeps your headings and lists. You don't need the Companion to send a page to your Mac anymore, a flick copies it and you paste it there. If you do use the Companion, the iPad now asks before joining a Mac it hasn't seen before. And Pen Friend is on iPhone, as a reader, so the pages you wrote on your iPad come with you. Ink stays put while you move around the page, notes open smoother, search keeps up with your typing, and a pile of small bugs are gone. ### 1.2 — 2026-10-23 • Drop a PDF on your Mac's notch, mark it up on the iPad, and send it back. It lands on the Mac's clipboard, ready to paste. • Marking up a screenshot can now end on your page, not only on the Mac. • Pictures turn with a handle and can be carried to another page. Writing around a picture can be left behind when it moves. • Sending a worklog no longer waits for the briefing, so it works with the AI switch off. • Icons line up on one scale, and dark mode reads better on the page. ### 1.1 — 2026-10-07 No release notes. ## More apps by BISHWAS BHANDARI - [Loaded Bible](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/loaded-bible/id6820404392) - [Pass the Blessing](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/pass-the-blessing/id6827030424) All apps by BISHWAS BHANDARI: https://appshunter.io/developer/6813766129 --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-11-10.*