Handwriting apps, before there is anything to write with
Apple's own FAQ puts stylus support later in the year. Until it arrives these are finger-and-keyboard apps, and that changes which of them is worth opening now.
The product page is direct about it. Apple's FAQ says the phone “will work with Apple Pencil (USB-C)”, and then says that support is coming later this year. The device is on sale; the thing you would write with is not here yet. Every app in this group was built around a nib, so the gap between those two sentences is the whole subject of this list.
What is left is more than it sounds. Typing over a document, reading one at something near its own proportions, filling in a form, recording a lecture against notes that are being typed, moving objects around a board with a fingertip — none of that waits for a stylus, and all of it is better on a page that is bigger. What varies is how much of itself each app can hand over in the meantime.
The order runs from apps that are fully usable today to apps that are mostly waiting. None of it is a judgement of the app, only of what the device can offer it today.
- 1
PDF Expert: Editor & Converter
Readdle Technologies Limited
Read, annotate, fill, sign, then merge or split the result. Only one of those is handwriting: a form field can be typed into and a signature is drawn once and kept, so what is left is a navigation problem — finding the right page, and seeing the field and the question it answers at the same time — which the larger page solves on its own.
- 2
Notability: AI Notes & PDF app
Ginger Labs, Inc.
Typed notes, imported documents and recorded audio tied to the point in the notes it was recorded at. In a lecture the recording is the part doing the work, and it asks for neither a nib nor a decision. It asks for the slide and the notes about the slide to be legible at once, which is a size problem rather than an input one.
- 3
Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft Corporation
A free-form canvas with notebooks and sections down the side, where typing has always been the primary input and handwriting one of several. The side navigation is what a phone hides, and it is also what makes a notebook feel like a notebook instead of a list of pages you scroll through hoping to recognise one.
- 4
Freeform
Apple Distribution International
A board with no edges, holding images, text boxes, shapes, links and files at least as often as it holds drawings. Objects the size of a fingertip arranged on a board the size of a palm was always how this would go on a phone, and a board twice the size is an improvement that needs nothing else to arrive first.
- 5
Goodnotes: AI Notes, Docs, PDF
Notes & PDFs · Goodnotes Limited
The strongest argument on the site for a bigger page, and the one with the most to wait for. Reading and marking up a document at near its real proportions works today; writing on that document is the half that arrives when the stylus does. Here in the meantime because the documents are already in it and they are already the right way up.
- 6
forScore
forScore LLC
Sheet music, where the page is the product and reading it is most of the use. Turning pages, reordering a set list and keeping a library straight ask nothing of a stylus. The annotations musicians actually make — a fingering, a cut, a reminder — are the half that waits, and they are not a small half.
- 7
Concepts
TopHatch, Inc.
Precise vector drawing over a canvas that carries on past the edge of the screen, and the most honest entry about the wait. Panning and zooming were always finger work; the lines were not. A sketch made with a fingertip is a different kind of sketch, and pretending otherwise would be the sort of claim this site tries not to make.
The selection and the order are ours. Each entry is written from that app’s own App Store listing, linked beside it, and this page from Apple's iPhone Duo product page. Drafted with AI assistance and checked back against those sources before publishing; the disclosure page explains how. The iPhone Duo has been on sale since 23 October 2026 and nothing here has been seen running on one, so what each entry says about the fold is an argument rather than a test.