Underway vs Furigana Notepad
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Underway
Read full descriptionHide full description
Open Underway and you land on today. Type one plain line and it becomes a dated entry. Scroll back a month and it is all still there, ticked off, on the day you did it. The days behind you sit just above, the days ahead just below, and you scroll straight through them, back through last year or forward into next. If you have ever dated a page in a paper notebook and written one line per thing, this is that, typed. Write "lunch with Sam friday 2pm #work" and Underway pulls out the date, the time and the tag on its own. Type ! or !! to mark a line important. No forms, no fields, no five taps to write down one thing. A line can be a trip, a day off, a bill, an appointment, a birthday, or where someone else in the family is that afternoon. A calendar wants a start time and an end time. A to do list wants a checkbox. A lot of life is neither, and all of it can go in here and still be findable months later. Finished tasks do not vanish. They stay on the day you did them, quietly greyed, so scrolling back through last month shows you what you actually got done. Your plan for the year and your record of it are the same thing. There is nothing to set up. No projects, no lists to build first. You open it and start typing. WHAT IS IN IT • Dates and days of the week are tinted, so a glance tells you where you are. • A switch to hide finished lines, if you would rather see only what is left. • Overdue in one move. A banner counts what slipped and offers to bring it all to today, or clear it. • Tags and priorities you type, not pick from a menu. # for a tag, ! for important. • Search across everything, still fast at tens of thousands of entries, and a calendar view to jump to any date. • Vault, for anything that has no date yet, with an optional nudge to look through it. • Repeats. Daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, ending on a date or after a count. Change one, or change this one and every one after it. • Optional reminders on anything with a time, and birthdays brought in from Contacts once so they come back every year. • Widgets on your Home Screen and Lock Screen. Tap one to land on the task. • Apple Watch. Today, overdue and the week ahead on your wrist. Tick things off, or dictate a new line and it arrives on your phone. • A look back, if you want one. How often you finish on time, what you added and completed, and how long your streak is. • Themes, palettes and paper textures. • Backups you keep. Take out a full copy, or a lightweight one you can read in any text editor, and import it back whenever you like. NO ACCOUNT, NO SERVER No sign in. No ads. No trackers. Your tasks are not sent to us, and there is nowhere for us to send them. Everything lives on your iPhone, your watch talks straight to your phone, and you can take a copy out whenever you want. Free, with nothing to buy inside. Available in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.
Furigana Notepad
Read full descriptionHide full description
Furigana Notepad is a notepad that lets you give any word in your notes the reading (furigana / ruby text) you like, and keeps it. Creative readings such as 約束《ちかい》, or readings for kanji you cannot read yet: you decide. Built for novel and script drafts, dialogue readings, and Japanese study. Select text and add a reading. Register readings you use often in a dictionary, and they appear automatically from then on. Assign a dictionary per folder to switch readings by project or by textbook. ■ Manual ruby Select any range of text and give that one spot its own reading — useful when the same kanji is read differently depending on context, such as a character's line in a novel. You can register it to the dictionary from the same dialog. ■ Automatic furigana Register a word and its reading, and matching text in your notes gets ruby text automatically. Assign a dictionary per folder to keep multiple stories or study sets separate. Reorder a folder's dictionaries to set their priority; when the same word is in more than one, the reading from the higher one is used. Words in the Shared Dictionary apply to every memo regardless of folder settings. ■ Live ruby preview while editing Split the editor into two panes. The lower pane shows your text with ruby applied as you type, so you can check the result without switching to view mode. ■ Select and copy in view mode Select the body text and copy it as plain text. When you want ruby text included, use the novel-site notation export instead. ■ Novel-site ruby notation export Supports four formats: Narou-style (|kanji《ruby》), pixiv, Alphapolis, and HTML. Converts your text so it can be pasted straight into novel submission sites. ■ Import from novel-site notation Paste text written in Narou-style, pixiv, Alphapolis, or HTML ruby notation, and it becomes a note with ruby text applied. The format is detected automatically, and the readings it contains can be registered to a dictionary in one go. ■ PDF export with furigana Create a PDF with ruby text, choosing vertical or horizontal writing, paper size (A4 / B5), typeface (Mincho / Gothic), font size, characters per line, line spacing, and margins. Share, save, or print it (Premium feature). ■ Note management Full-text search, pinning, a trash (auto-deletes after 30 days, with undo), and autosave are all built in. Folders can be nested without limit, sorted by name or update time, and moved by dragging. ■ Your data and Premium No account required. Memos are stored on your device and never uploaded to our servers (OS backups follow your device settings). The free version shows ads. Watch a video for 24 hours ad-free, or buy Premium once for permanent ad-free use and PDF export. See the privacy policy for how ads and crash reporting handle data. Whether you're writing a novel or studying Japanese, the readings are yours to decide. Service names mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Underway at none against Furigana Notepad's 1. Underway also leads on ads (none vs shown). Furigana Notepad's advantage is iOS requirement (15.0 vs 18.0). On price and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Furigana Notepad sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Underway asks for nothing beyond the download.
| Parameter | Underway | Furigana Notepad |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | — | Every 2 days |
| Ads | No — better | Yes |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 10 MB | 53 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Cylandea Systems LLC | QuickServe Corporation |
In-app purchases
Underway
No in-app purchases
Furigana Notepad
- Premium$2.99









