Thingway is made in Glasgow
Thingway as an idea was founded quite frankly out of frustration with every other available option, and built by one person in the heart of Scotland, with help from other artists and local creatives. It is independent, there are no investors, and no acquisition plan.
The creative independence is entirely the point. Most writing software, and most software in general, is now owned by corporate entities whose interests are completely and commercially removed from yours. You and your work becomes training data, and the features you actually use to do the things you need to get moved behind a paywall after years. Thingway is designed to work entirely offline, with your writing sitting in ordinary files, in a folder you choose, on a device you own, and that's all there is to it.
"Serious" writing tools have historically been overly expensive, desktop-bound or requiring a cloud licence, and built on the assumption that you write while figuratively tied to a desk with hours to spare. That excludes an enormous number of people, including myself, who write in the times between, on the train, during breaks between classes, on a phone, and before late night shifts.
The aim is to make a secure, offline and genuinely good tool available to everyone, on the device they actually have, without needing the internet beyond the initial download, and without asking anyone to hand over their work or their data in exchange.
Thingway will not write for you. There is no AI ghostwriter in this app, and there will never be one.
This is not technophobia. Thingway uses machine learning where it genuinely serves you. The Offline translation system across 35 European languages for example, with modeling developed ethically by European researchers, and running entirely on your device that never sends a sentence anywhere. This is for those who simply can't afford professional translation, nor are able to safely or ethically use cloud tools on their documents. In short, I'm for building supportive tools that help you do your work, not tools that do it instead of you.
I think the interesting problem is not how to generate more text. It is how to help a person write that unique thing that only they could write, and, rather increasingly, how to let them prove they did so to.
This feature is planned, not yet built.
We are increasingly being asked to prove our work is our own. AI-detection tools are unreliable, scrape data from unaware and unconsenting individuals, and produce false accusations, particularly against people whose prose happens to be clean, or who write in a second language. A student can be failed, or an author accused, on the basis of a percentage produced by a system nobody can audit, and often one that nobody consented to.
Thingway already keeps every draft of every passage. That version history is a genuine record of a piece of writing being made: hesitated over, rewritten, and probably reworked a hundred times. The plan is to let you turn that into a report you can hand to a supervisor, professor, an editor, or a publisher.
Alongside version history, it would consider the shape of how a document was written:
What it can't do, and would not do: log your keys, record what you wrote, or send anything anywhere. It reads the same local file history the app already keeps in order to give you your drafts back. The report is generated by you, on your device, and shared only if you choose to share it.
It will not be perfect, and it will not be a lie detector. Someone technically minded, and determined to fake it could. But a genuine record of a work being written over months is far better evidence of authorship than a detector's guess, without requiring questionable detector checks.
Thingway at its heart is for you, its an authoring tool for the modern age that doesn't ask or require anything from you other than your time.
There is a real person at the other end of .
* Thingway is free to download and use on mobile. Some features (custom themes, translation, and the built-in thesaurus and dictionary) are part of Premium, a monthly or annual subscription. The desktop app is a one-time paid licence. Exporting your work is free on every platform, always.