WriteTimer vs Jottle

Writers of all types deserve a dedicated timer. WriteTimer helps you build a daily writing habit with focused sprint sessions, word count tracking, achievement milestones, and beautiful progress rings — no accounts, no ads, and no data ever leaving your device. HOW IT WORKS Choose a session length or dial in a custom duration and press play. A full-screen countdown begins, with three animated progress rings showing your daily, weekly, and yearly writing time at a glance. Completed sessions are logged automatically. Need more time mid-sprint? Tap any preset to add minutes to a running timer without interrupting your flow. TRACK YOUR WRITING After each session, log a note about what you worked on, how many words you wrote, and even add a customizable tag. WriteTimer calculates your words-per-minute pace automatically and saves everything to your session history. Browse your history sorted by date, word count, or project tag. Tap any session entry to edit its note, word count, or tags from a single screen. The Stats tab shows daily, weekly, and yearly writing totals alongside a seven-day activity chart. BUILD YOUR HABIT WriteTimer tracks your writing streak day by day and awards achievements as you hit milestones — your first session, your first word count, consistent weeks, and more. A customizable daily reminder notification nudges you to open the app and write. FEATURES • No subscriptions - pay once for lifetime • Sprint timer with 7 presets and a custom duration option • Add minutes to any running session without stopping • Three animated progress rings — daily, weekly, and yearly goals • Automatic session logging for any session over one minute • Word count tracking with live words-per-minute calculation • Session notes to capture what you worked on • Project tags to organize sessions by book, blog, or project • Sortable session history — by date, word count, or tag • Writing streaks to build and maintain your habit • Achievements to mark your milestones • Five hand-crafted color themes you can customize • Fully customizable progress ring colors • Six completion sounds to mark the end of each sprint • Daily reminder notification at a time you choose • Stats view with a seven-day writing activity chart YOUR PRIVACY WriteTimer collects no data whatsoever. There are no accounts to create, no analytics running in the background, and no third-party SDKs of any kind. Everything — your sessions, word counts, notes, tags, and streaks — lives entirely on your device. BUILT FOR WRITERS Whether you're working on a novel, a blog post, a screenplay, or a daily journal practice, WriteTimer gives you the motivation and structure to sit down, focus, and write. Every session is logged. Every word is counted. Every streak is worth protecting.

Jottle is for the thought you need to get down before it's gone. Open it and there's a blank line, waiting. Type the thought, tap Add Note, and get on with your day. There's nothing to set up and nothing to file. A note is a piece of plain text with a date on it. The first line becomes the title. That's the whole model, and it's why capture takes a second instead of a minute. EACH DEVICE GETS ITS OWN SHAPE • iPhone: the list and the editor, and nothing between you and the blank line • iPad: your notes on the left and a full page for writing on the right • Apple Watch: a real app, not a mirror. Dictate or scribble from your wrist. It syncs straight from iCloud, so it works with your phone out of range • Mac: Jottle is there too, as a notepad that drops in over whatever you're doing with one keystroke Notes sync through your own iCloud account. There's no Jottle account, no sign-in, and no server of ours in the middle. WIDGETS AND COMPLICATIONS Pin the notes that matter and they show up in the Pinned Notes widget, small, medium or large, on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen or in Notification Center. On the watch, put New Note on your face to dictate with one tap, or Recent Notes to read your latest at a glance. LOCKED NOTES, ACTUALLY LOCKED Lock any note and its body is encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a passphrase only you know, derived with PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations. Only the ciphertext is stored and only the ciphertext syncs, so a locked note is unreadable everywhere except on a device where you've entered the passphrase. Face ID or Touch ID unlocks it after the first time, and an open locked note is hidden from the app switcher. There's no recovery and no backdoor. Forget the passphrase and the note is gone for good. That's not an oversight. It's the feature. PLAIN TEXT, NOT A TRAP Export one note or all of them as ordinary Markdown files, with the dates kept in the front matter. Import a folder of them back. They open in any editor and are already covered by whatever backup you run. You are never locked in. THE REST OF IT Pin a note to keep it at the top. Archive one to get it out of the way without deleting it. Search across everything, or find within the note you're editing. MAKE IT YOURS Eight accent colors, light or dark, on a Paper or Bright background, and a text size your eyes agree with. Your watch keeps a color of its own. FREE Jottle on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch is free, with every feature. The Mac app is a separate choice: a free 14-day trial, then a one-time purchase. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO No account. No subscription. No analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no third-party SDKs of any kind. Jottle makes no network requests of its own. The only thing it talks to is your iCloud, at your instruction. Nothing about you or your notes is collected, because there is nothing in it to collect them with. Requires iOS or iPadOS 26. The Apple Watch app requires watchOS 26. Syncing needs an Apple Account signed in with iCloud Drive on. Without one, Jottle runs perfectly well on a single device and tells you plainly that it isn't syncing.