Thingway is made in Glasgow
Thingway as an idea was founded and built by one person in the heart of Scotland, with help from other artists and creatives rather than a boardroom. It is independent: no investors, no acquisition plan, nobody upstream deciding that your writing would be more valuable to them than it is to you.
The independence is the point. Most writing software, and most software in general, is now owned by corporate entites whose interests diverge from yours the moment there is money in it, our work becomes training data, everyday features get moved behind a paywall after years. Thingway is designed so none of that is possible: your writing sits in ordinary files, in a folder you chose, on a device you own.
"Serious" writing tools have historically been overly expensive, desktop-bound, and built on the assumption that you write at a desk with hours to spare. That quietly excludes an enormous number of people who write in the gaps between, on a bus, on a break, on a phone, between shifts.
The aim is to make the good tools available to everyone, on the device they actually have, without asking them 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.
That is not technophobia. Thingway uses machine learning where it genuinely serves a writer such as offline translation across 35 European languages, for instance, which runs entirely on your device and never sends a sentence anywhere. for those who simply can't afford professional translation, nor are able to use cloud tools. The distinction is simple: 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 the thing only they could have written — and, increasingly, how to let them prove they did.
This feature is planned, not yet built. It is described here because it is where the project is heading, not because you can use it today.
Writers are increasingly asked to prove their work is their own. AI-detection tools are unreliable 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.
Thingway already keeps every draft of every passage. That version history is a record of a piece of writing being made being hesitated over, rewritten, reworked and often restored. The plan is to let you turn that into a report you can hand to a supervisor, an editor, or a publisher.
Alongside version history, it would consider the shape of how a document was written:
What it would not do: log your keystrokes, 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 determined to fake it could. But a genuine record of a manuscript being written over months is far better evidence of authorship than a detector's guess — and it puts the proof in the writer's hands rather than an accuser's.
There is a real person at the other end of .