There are a lot of note-taking and writing apps out there in the market, but there are times when you have a writing deadline or a very important article or report to write, where you don’t need any distractions from the app’s other features. Our iOS friends have been enjoying one such minimalist app for the past years, but now it has finally arrived for Android devices, and a blog post from the developer might also signal a new appreciation of Android for those who have been on the “other side”.
iA Writer has been available for Apple devices since 2010, and it’s only now years later that the developers have thought of coming on to the Android platform. The features are basically the same, with no complicated formatting settings or interactions, with a custom typeface that will get you writing and a Markdown feature that you can use if in case you need some simple formatting options. It even has a Focus Mode that will let you focus on the current sentence or paragraph you’re writing. Of course all documents can be seamlessly synced to Dropbox.
Aside from the fact that it’s finally on Android, another great thing to come out of this is that the developers, Information Architects, which has always been associated with Apple Devs, has said that the “horror stories” about Android are in the past. The core tools are now “very stable”, and they even found to their surprise a “friendly” dev culture in the Android community. This might convince some of the purely iOS developers to also bring their apps to the “other side”, giving users even more options and choices.
So if you’d like to see what the fuss is all about this minimalist writing app, you can get iA Writer from the Google Play Store. It has a bit of a “steep” price of $4.99, but people are saying it’s worth it, so maybe you wouldn’t mind spending that much.
