Hi Sazzy,
This thread asks the same question. It’s from 2020, but the app hasn’t seen any updates since then, so all points are still valid. Hopefully you find something useful in there.
Also, in the final post in this other thread, the poster says they’ve started a Scrivener self-help page for iOS-only users. I have no idea how useful it is, but thought it might be worth your time having a look at it.
I own both Windows and iOS versions. I find the iOS version useful for writing on the go on my phone. Also, sometimes when I’m drafting and just looking to get the words down, the iOS version’s stripped-down interface is just the ticket.
That said, the main challenge I would have going iOS-only is getting the words out of Scrivener. Let me explain –
All versions of Scrivener have a feature called Compile. On the desktop version, Compile is super sophisticated. It’s like an export engine on steroids. You can compile to PDF, Word, RTF, plain text, ebook, html, and others, and you can fine tune the output to look completely different from how it’s formatted in Scrivener.
iOS Scrivener’s Compile feature is an extreme lightweight in comparison, and more like the vanilla export functions I’ve seen in other apps. It can compile to PDF, Word, RTF, plain text, but with limited options. The documentation on how to use it is minimal and hard to find.
So – whether this will be a problem for you depends on what type of writing you do and what you intend to do with it.
For instance, if you’re writing and subbing short stories, than iOS-only might be perfect. You could draft and edit the story in Scrivener, compile it to Word, then minimally tweak the formatting in Word as needed and send it off.
Probably a similar process would work with novels, if you’re submitting via Word. If you’re self-publishing, you’d need other tools besides Scrivener to generate your ebooks.
However, if you’re writing non-fiction, where you need to incorporate a lot of specific formatting or images or what-not, then creating a rough draft in IOS Scrivener could work, but at some point you’d need to import it into another tool for all the formatting bells & whistles.
Just my $.02.
Best,
Jim