BookWrite vs Igneous
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
BookWrite
This app transforms your writing experience by allowing you to craft books with customizable aesthetics, from cover design to page style. It offers tools for organizing stories, drawing, illustrating, and exporting your work in various formats. It also includes features to help you maintain writing habits and ensure your work remains private.
- Customizable book aesthetics (cover, pages, pen)
- Locked diary with Face ID/passcode
- Drawing and illustration tools
- Story organization (plot board, story bible)
- Export to PDF, EPUB, TXT, audiobook
- Writing goal tracking and prompts
- Privacy-focused with no ads or tracking
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Step through the door of an old bookshop and write. Open ScribeMe and you're standing at the door of a bookshop. Push it open, step inside, and your library is waiting on the shelf - every book you've written, standing spine-out, in whatever order you like. MAKE A BOOK, NOT A DOCUMENT Choose how a book feels before you write a word: hardcover, leather, cloth or paperback; the colour of the boards; cream, white or parchment pages; and the pen in your hand - fountain pen, ballpoint, pencil or marker, each with its own ink and weight of line. Pick a typeface with real character. Every cover gets its own grain, so no two books on your shelf look alike. Tall, square and wide picture-book shapes are all here. A DIARY THAT LOCKS Any book can be locked with Face ID or your passcode - a private diary that stays private. Night pages give you dark paper and light ink for writing after bedtime. WRITE, DRAW, ILLUSTRATE Real styling: bold, italics, centred lines, scene breaks. Draw straight onto the page with Apple Pencil or a fingertip, and add photo illustrations wherever you like. Draw your own cover, too. ORGANIZE A REAL STORY Chapters with a contents sheet. A plot board that lays your pages out at a glance. A story bible that interviews your characters and remembers your places. Story templates - three acts, hero's journey, fairy tale, mystery - that scaffold the chapters for you. Find and replace, and search across the whole shelf. TAKE IT OFF THE DEVICE Export a typeset PDF with cover, dedication, contents and illustration plates. Print a fold-at-home booklet. Make an EPUB ebook, a plain-text file, or an audiobook read aloud. Back up your whole library to a single file and carry it to another device. KEEP GOING Daily goals, streaks, milestones and writing sprints. A home-screen widget with your shelf and your streak. An evening writing prompt if you want one. Read a finished book with a real page curl, or have it read to you. YOURS, AND PRIVATE No account, no sign-up, no ads, no tracking, no subscriptions, and nothing is ever collected. Your books live on your device. Turn on iCloud sync (beta) and they sync through your own private iCloud - still nobody else's. Automatic version snapshots mean nothing you write is ever really lost. Everything in ScribeMe is included, free. It always will be. Made for iPhone and iPad.
Igneous
This app offers a gesture-driven approach to note-taking, allowing users to manage their Markdown files with one-handed navigation. It supports various cloud storage options and integrates features like voice notes, live Markdown rendering, and drawing capabilities.
- One-thumb gesture navigation
- Plain Markdown file storage
- iCloud Drive and Files integration
- Live Markdown rendering
- Voice note recording and transcription
- Drawing and sketching canvases
- Mac and offline synchronization
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Igneous is a notes app you drive with one thumb. On iPhone there's no toolbar at the top of the screen: everything lives in one dock at the bottom, and it moves the way Safari's tab bar does. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you choose — on your device, in iCloud Drive, or anywhere Files can reach — so they open in any other app, today and in twenty years. No account, no database, no analytics. GET ANYWHERE WITHOUT REACHING • Tap the pill in the dock to search every note, like tapping Safari's address bar. • Swipe it sideways to move between open notes, and keep going past the last one for a new note. • Swipe up on it and your open notes spread out as cards. • Swipe in from the left edge for your notebook, and from the right for the Inspector. • Pull down on a note to find a word in it. Hold any button for more. • While you read, the dock folds into a slim pill out of the way. Liquid Glass on iOS 26; solid with Reduce Transparency. • On iPad: a floating notebook pane, a real tab bar, and as many windows as Stage Manager will hold. CAPTURE THE MOMENT • Press the Action Button, a Lock Screen widget or a Control Center tile and you're typing in a new note — even from a closed app. • Record a voice note from the Action Button, Siri, the app icon or the note you're in. Igneous transcribes it on your device while you talk, shows the words on the Lock Screen, and saves the audio and transcript into today's note or a note of its own. • Copy a voice note — recording and transcript together — and paste it into Messages, Mail or another note. WRITE IN MARKDOWN, SEE IT BEAUTIFULLY • A live editor that renders headings, lists, tasks, tables, callouts, highlights, maths and diagrams as you type, while the file stays plain text. • A formatting bar just above the keyboard, and Writing Tools that keep your links and structure intact. • Wikilinks, embeds, backlinks, tags and a graph of how your notes connect. • Search every note instantly, including handwriting on your canvases. • Daily notes, a calendar, tasks gathered from every note, templates and a board view. DRAW WHEN WORDS WON'T DO • Canvases for sketches and diagrams, with Apple Pencil on iPad, beside cards and links to your notes. • Opens JSON Canvas and Excalidraw drawings. WORKS WITH YOUR MAC — AND OFFLINE • Keep a notebook in iCloud Drive ▸ Igneous and it's on all your devices. • Or pair with Igneous on your Mac over your own network: the phone keeps a full offline copy and sends its edits when it's back. Changes to different lines are combined, and if you both changed the same words, both versions are kept. Drawings merge shape by shape. • Nothing ever passes through a server of ours — there isn't one. SHORTCUTS, SIRI AND WIDGETS • Actions for new notes, today's note, tasks, search and voice notes, ready for Shortcuts and Siri. • Home Screen widgets with buttons you choose, Lock Screen widgets, Control Center controls, Focus filters and Live Activities. YOUR NOTES, YOUR FILES Igneous reads Obsidian-flavoured Markdown as written and never adds anything you didn't ask for. Point it at the vault you already keep.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: BookWrite at 5.0 against Igneous's 4.0. BookWrite also leads on in-app purchases (none vs 3). Igneous's advantage is update cadence (every 2 days vs fortnightly) and ratings volume (5 vs 1). On price, ads, monetization model 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. Igneous sells 3 one-off in-app purchases. BookWrite asks for nothing beyond the download.
BookWrite holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.0. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Igneous has 5 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
BookWrite ships an update fortnightly, Igneous every 2 days. Both last shipped on November 6, 2026.
| Parameter | BookWrite | Igneous |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | 4.0 (5 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | — | 66.7% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 1 | 5 — better |
| Update frequency | Fortnightly | Every 2 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 18.1 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 33 MB | 49 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Richard Wheatley | JASON RANDALL DORFMAN |
Customer experience
BookWrite
Igneous
In-app purchases
BookWrite
No in-app purchases
Igneous
- Small Tip$9.99
- Medium Tip$24.99
- Large Tip$49.99







