Storyist 4

• Free Trial — $0.00
• Storyist 4 — $19.99
• Storyist 4 Upgrade — $9.99

Last verified 6 Aug 2026

4.3 383 ratings · App Store

1. 4/5A little frustrating but better than the others

   I’ve compared this one to all the other screenplay applications, including Final Draft. I’d say it’s a close one between this and Final Draft. This one is a little more user friendly. But this does have a lot of UI problems when entering split screen mode on iPad. On the phone, when you tap on an area to type, it automatically zooms in so you can get a closer look at what you’re typing. But... it zooms in the wrong area. So I cannot see what I am typing. So I manually zoom out and try to type again and it zooms in again to try to be helpful. But it keeps zooming in the wrong area over and over again. So it has its problems on both iOS and iPad OS, but at least it’s somewhat usable. There are workarounds such as entering the “phone-optimized view”. So it doesn’t have to zoom in and out. The others apps... forget about them. It seems that no developer knows how to make a screenplay application, but Storyist is closest to a professional screenplay app you would expect coming from a desktop.

   Mistygio · 6 Aug 2026

2. 4/5Update: Lost Everything with Upgrade

   I just upgrade to IOS 14 and the Storyist update for it. Went to open a book that I’ve been working on and absolutely nothing was there. The word counter said there were so many words, but they were not on the page. Luckily I still have Storyist 3 and I have 4 on another computer, plus I have the book mostly backed up on other software so it is not much of a loss. Weird, though. Simply no words on the page. Wish: I wish there was a template in Storyist for non-fiction and such where you could do footnotes and all that kind of thing. Need that right now. Update: This problem kept going, then I found out more or less by accident what was wrong. Storyist 4 does not seem to save to Storyist icloud and it shut down when the Storyist 3/4 were running simultaneously, especially on the ipad. I had to save the projects in iCloud Drive and then they opened fine. To his credit, the developer was on it and I want to thank him for that here. To this end, I hope that Storyist 4 also adds the ability for footnotes/endnotes in future updates as I (and I am sure that there are many others as well) do much non-fiction on Storyist and need that feature. So problem is basically solved, developer was on top of it, and add a couple more features if possible. I bought/Downloaded the newest Storyist version on both mac/iOS. I have not had much time with it yet, but whenever I tried to open up a short piece I created to experiment with it on the IOS, Storyist 4 just crashes and shuts down. I am on an iPad Pro 10.5. I will not even let me create a new project, but just shuts down. Hmmm...

   Angrysocialist · 6 Aug 2026

3. 3/5Great, except when the iOS app eats styles

   I’ve used Storyist for years on desktop and iOS, but recently, if I make a change to any style via the iOS app, within minutes the edited style vanishes and anything uses it reverts to the default style. If I change the default style, ALL styles disappear and the entire document becomes a wall of text. To correct this, I have to go to my desktop install of Storyist, re-create all styles, and re-apply them line by line to the entire document—because they’re totally wiped out. Chapter titles, separators, section text. Gone. Not the worst when it’s a short story, but I found this out working on a 70k draft. Storyist 3 never had this problem; it’s new to the Storyist 4 app and I hope it’ll be corrected soon, otherwise I might finally switch to the competition. Writers should be able to safely change fonts on an iPad without worrying that all of the styles will be stripped. This bug is a deal breaker.

   jessrunsontea · 6 Aug 2026

4. 1/5Storyist sometimes deletes all your work!!!

   Huge danger warning here, I must echo previous reviews like the one posted by RyGuy486 and report that STORYIST SOMETIMES AUTO-DELETES ALL YOUR WORK. This happened to me twice now, the first time I thought it was because I was using OneDrive for file storage. But I switched back to the default Apple cloud file storage AND A WEEK LATER IT HAPPENED AGAIN. I’ve now lost hours and hours of writing, which is just so disheartening. I can see from Apple’s file versions that Storyist gets confused and starts to save the same version of a file over and over (instead of saving a version with any new modified work). Then if you power down, it auto-restores to that last version... and everything is gone. Perhaps this won’t happen if I just save files to the local iPad instead of any cloud storage? Perhaps it happened because I connected to a wireless network AFTER starting Storyist? In the end I don’t care why. This is just one of the worst possible bugs a program like this could have. Sorry to say this program is NOT reliable for professional work. Stay away.

   RenderWizard · 6 Aug 2026

5. 4/5Still decent

   TL;DR - Functional, could be better. But still functional and works. The new UI needs to get used to, as it is rather simplistic and requires a few taps to navigate files. Default sync is iCloud instead of Dropbox, and it doesn’t look like we can change cloud services. While iCloud is nice, I don’t have much storage left and I much prefer Dropbox as all my previous Storyist 3 files were in there. There are three themes other than Classic. Light, Dark, and Storyist for Mac. They serve well for what they are, but honestly, I wish there was a few more themes. The editor is roughly the same as the legacy version. No major overhaul, and I don’t think I mind. The font is still that manuscript looking one - Courier I believe - and functions as a viewable font. Navigation, as I’ve said before, is a bit weird. There’s a “recent” and a “browse” tab at the bottom, meaning of you’ve a lot of Storyist files/documents, it might be a bit of a hassle to look for something. Files downloaded from Dropbox don’t appear in recent until you’ve opened them and edited the document(s) a bit. It looks a lot cleaner, but still a bit dated. I don’t know what it is, but the UI refresh feels a bit underwhelming. No three panel navigation for [Library], then [folder], and finally [editor], sort of like Ulysses or Bear. That type of navigation of the files is much better than the one provided here. Overall, this is a decent app if you hadn’t bought the Legacy version and was spoiled by the previous layout or by Bear or Ulysses. I still bought the full app because I appreciate the updates and the developers. Hopefully there would be a minor UI navigation change, as that is probably the only gripe I have for this app. Thanks for the update and the discount!

   Tomaganuk96 · 6 Aug 2026

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