A tidy-up, with apologies to everyone who holds their phone sideways. • Bug: on iPhone in landscape, Restore Purchase and the legal links hid below the screen with no way to scroll to them. Fix: the unlock screen scrolls now, so nothing hides. • Bug: the first handwriting check squeezed the writing area into a strip about as tall as a grain of rice. Fix: you get a proper writing box on every screen. • Bug: finger writers who scored 91 got the tip "Focus on Pressure", from a finger that has no pressure to give. Fix: pressure tips are for Apple Pencil only, and fingers no longer get fake compliments on their grip either. • Bug: Progress said "100 XP needed for Level 1" to people already on Level 1. Fix: it now counts down to the next level, like a sensible progress bar. • Bug: a word with a missing translation showed a blank meaning. Fix: it falls back to English instead of staring at you. Plus a sturdier save file, so your progress survives even if the app has a bad day.

What's new in 1.3.0 • Practise writing in 8 languages, whatever language the app speaks. Keep the menus in English and write Chinese, Japanese hiragana, Hindi, French, German, Spanish or Romanian. Stroke instructions stay in your language, because "横折" is not a helpful instruction if you can't read it. • Romanian has arrived, as an app language and a writing language. Ș and ț get proper commas underneath, not cedillas. Our tests reject the impostors. • New Word Explorer: what each word means, how to say it (pinyin, romaji or Hindi romanisation) and a slow button for when the voice talks faster than you think. • New Meaning Quiz: read it, hear it, then write it from memory. Words you know come back on later days, so they stick instead of quietly leaving. • Easier to find your way around: five tabs (Learn, Letters, Practise, Words, Progress) replace one very long home screen that took an archaeologist to scroll through. • Text now follows your device's text size setting. Bigger text is finally bigger. • We had been teaching 白 in the wrong stroke order. It is fixed, and the character has been very gracious about it. • Fluency drills, comic panels, postcards and wanted posters did all the work and saved none of it. Every activity now records progress. • Switching languages no longer loses your place. Each script remembers where you stopped. • The parent screen stopped flagging finger writers for "irregular pressure" on a finger that has no pressure to measure. It also stopped judging print "a" and cursive "a" as one very inconsistent letter. • Long parent reports now continue onto a second page instead of falling off the bottom of the first. • Free Write no longer saves the same drawing again every time you tap Submit, and finishing the warm-up shapes takes you home instead of leaving you on the last one. • On iPad, your score hid below the screen after Check Letter, like a shy trophy. It now scrolls into view. • Sharing and Reset now ask a grown-up first.

Updated for iOS 27 with compatibility and reliability improvements.

• Our sentence scorer sent dots and high strokes to visit the line above. The trip is over: they're now assessed with the correct writing line.

What’s fixed in 1.2.8 • Prices now come directly from your App Store storefront and currency. Our brief career in guessing dollar signs is over. • Restore Purchases now explains when nothing was found, reports errors, and clearly labels purchases awaiting family approval. • Refunded or revoked unlocks now reconcile correctly, including when the app returns to the foreground. • The seven-day trial can no longer claim it has more than seven days left if the device clock takes an imaginative detour. • Apple’s native review request now waits for several successful practice sessions and a quiet success moment, without interrupting a lesson.

• No shiny new features this time. This is a housekeeping release — brooms, screwdrivers, the works. • Everything under the hood got a once-over so future updates land smoothly. • If you notice absolutely nothing different, that's a ten out of ten from us.

Fixed the free-trial countdown so it stays capped at seven days even after device clock changes.

A little polish and behind-the-scenes improvements.

Small fixes and performance improvements to keep tracing smooth.

• We discovered the invisible scoring line was 59 points below the line we actually drew on screen. Your child's handwriting was always better than we said — sorry. Pen licences are now genuinely earnable. • Tracing the letter once (you know, the thing we ask you to do) could never score above ~53/100. Single letters are now judged on their merits, not on a technicality. • The b/d/p/q mirror-letter detector has been asleep since launch. It now actually wakes up and helps. • Japanese, Chinese and Hindi writing is now scored by the rules of its own script, and the Home letter grid shows your alphabet — not ours. • The first-run handwriting check now speaks your language instead of making everyone copy an English fox.

Behind-the-scenes polish and a tidy-up.

What's new in 1.2.1 • The "ask a grown-up" maths question had a cruel twist on iPhone: the number keyboard slid up and parked itself directly on top of the only button that let you continue. Parents solved the sum, reached confidently for "Submit," and found the keyboard had eaten it. You were now locked out of your own settings by primary-school arithmetic. • We replaced the pop-up keyboard with an on-screen number pad, so the question and the buttons finally share the screen instead of fighting over it. This affected every gate in the app — setup, settings, the paywall, external links — so we fixed all four at once. No more hostage situations.

Pen Licence 1.2.0 — The Humble Global Expansion • We shipped an app that only spoke English to a world full of children who don't. Embarrassing. Fixed: Pen Licence is now fully localised into 8 languages. • Japanese children can now trace hiragana instead of politely pretending the Roman alphabet is fine. We're sorry it took this long. • Chinese children get simplified-character starter strokes. We double-checked the stroke order. Three times. • Hindi children can trace Devanagari letters. The curves are unforgiving. The app handles it. • The app now runs on iPhone. Yes, it was iPad-only before. We know. You know. We're all moving on.

What's new in 1.1.4 • Search-listing tidy: we trimmed the keyword field of duplicates that the App Store indexer was politely ignoring, and added a few specific terms (sight words, year 1 writing, reception) that actual parents type into search. No change to anything inside the app — the pen still moves where you tell it.

What's new in 1.1.3 • Added a quiet review prompt that only appears after you've finished a few practice sessions with strong scores. We figured asking after a triumphant T was a better moment than asking on day one. We won't ask twice in a hurry.

Tightened a few loops. The cursive 'g' is finally on speaking terms with the cursive 'q'. Letter strokes a little gentler with wobbly hands.

Cursive added

Cursive added