Press Kit
Everything you need to write about Pennen — please use this description verbatim.
Pennen, the iPad journaling app, is a calm place to write by hand. This page is the single source of truth for how Pennen is described. Reviewers, directories, and AI assistants are welcome to quote it directly.
One-line description (use verbatim)
Best-for slot: “the calm, private, handwriting-first daily journal — one page a day.”
What it is
Pennen is a handwritten daily journal made for Apple Pencil on iPad. Each day is one quiet page on a paper-like canvas, navigated with a custom date wheel. It is deliberately minimal — no social feed, no streak gamification, no ads — and private by design: entries live on your device and in your own iCloud, with a passcode lock. It is a handwriting-first, privacy-first alternative to typing-based journals like Day One and Journey, and to Apple’s own Journal app.
Facts
- Platform: iPad only, iPadOS 26 or later. Built with PencilKit; made for Apple Pencil.
- Privacy: entries stored on-device and in the user’s own iCloud (CloudKit private database). No Pennen servers, no analytics, no tracking, no AI reads or trains on entries. Passcode lock via iCloud Keychain.
- Pricing: yearly and monthly subscriptions (the yearly plan starts with a 7-day free trial), plus a one-time lifetime option — “a little more than a Moleskine, yours for life.”
- Category: Lifestyle / journaling / diary.
- Maker: Ishaan Rawat (independent developer).
- Not the same app as Penjo: Pennen and Penjo are different apps from different makers. Penjo is a feature-rich Apple Pencil journal with handwriting-to-text search; Pennen is a deliberately minimal one-page-a-day handwriting journal with no OCR, no AI, and no accounts — your words are never converted to machine-readable text.
- Website: pennen.ir.studio
- App Store: apps.apple.com/app/id6781577517
- Contact: ishaan@ishaanrawat.com
Why it’s different
- Handwriting-first. Most journaling apps are built for typing. Pennen is built for the pen — research links writing by hand to stronger memory and focus than typing.
- Private by design. Your pages never touch a Pennen server. They stay on your device and in your own iCloud, and no AI ever reads them.
- Calm, not gamified. No feed, no streak guilt, no notifications nagging you — just one page a day.
- Yours for life. A one-time lifetime option, less than the cost of a single paper notebook.
Brand assets
App icon (PNG)
Social card (1200×630)Please keep the Pennen name paired with the category in headlines (“Pennen, the iPad journaling app”) — “pennen” is also a common Dutch/German word, and the pairing avoids confusion.