I write for a living and this is the only Mac and iOS app I’ll use in 2026
Homescreen heroes: Ulysses is my go-to writing app for books
· TechRadarNews By Carrie Marshall published 29 December 2025
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This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn't live without. Read them all here.
If you're a writer of any kind – a blogger, a copywriter, an aspiring novelist or any other kind of word wrangler – you'll know how important your writing tools can be. In the analogue world I'll only write seriously with a really nice pen and creamy paper. And in the digital realm, I write exclusively in Ulysses.
I think Ulysses might be the best writing app you can get on the Mac, on your iPhone or on your iPad. It's definitely the best one for me, which is why I've been using it for ten years now. That's literally millions of words, all written in one app.
What is Ulysses and how much does it cost?
Ulysses enables you to get words out of your brain and onto the page exceptionally quickly and easily, and features a distraction-free interface that hides all the stuff you don't need so you can concentrate on your words.
It's blazingly fast. And it enables you to manage even very large projects. I'm currently writing another book with it, and I use it daily for commercial copywriting, news reporting and little snippets like writing author bios, questions for events I'm hosting and logging things I want to remember later.
It's brilliant on the Mac and on an iPad with an external keyboard, and there's also an iPhone version so you can access, edit and scribble ideas on the go.
Ulysses isn't free, but it's pretty cheap: $39.99 / £39.99 (around AU$60) for an annual plan or £5.99 / $5.99 per month (about AU$9 p/month). Students can also pick it up for $10.99 / £9.99 (or around AU$17) for six months currently.
Why this is my Homescreen Hero
Ulysses is a write-once, publish-anywhere app. It uses Markdown, a form of plain text with simple shortcuts for quickly formatting, linking and structuring documents. Markdown was also designed with speed in mind.
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