EDITORIAL · WRITING · MAY 9, 2026 · 8 min
Four brainstorming apps Albert Einstein would have used if he'd had a Mac.
A working desk, not a tour. Four iPhone apps the App Comrade picks up when an idea is still half-formed — and a fifth we keep in case you'd rather start by writing.
The romance around brainstorming is that it happens on a napkin in a café in Vienna. The reality is that most useful thinking now happens on a phone, in the seven minutes between a meeting and a train, and the only equipment that matters is whatever opens fastest and gets out of the way.
A real brainstorming tool gets out of the way before you’ve decided what kind of thinking you’re doing. That’s the bar these four applications clear in different shapes — one as a capture surface, one as a room to argue with yourself in, one as a database for ideas that have grown shape, and one as the bridge that turns the residue of all three into a list of things you’ll actually do.
"A real brainstorming tool gets out of the way before you've decided what kind of thinking you're doing."
01 · APPLE
Drafts — the blank page that knows where to send the line you just wrote.
Drafts opens to an empty editor. No folders, no decisions, no welcome screen. You type, and what you've typed becomes a draft you can later send to a Markdown note, an email, a calendar event, a reminder, or a shared task list. That's the entire pitch — and it's the right pitch for the moment when an idea is still a sentence.
Where Drafts earns its place in this list is the action machinery: a published library of scripts that turn a paragraph into a Things task, a Bear note, a Slack message, an Apple Reminder, or a literal piece of MIDI. Most of the actions are user-contributed; the good ones are ruthless about doing exactly one thing. The app is free to capture in, Pro to script in, and the Pro tier is the cheapest way we know to automate "I'm not sure yet what this is" into "it's now in three places at once."
02 · APPLE
Bear — markdown thinking with a typography habit.
Where Drafts is the inbox, Bear is the room. It's a Markdown note
app with a serious typography practice: real serif faces, a
distraction-free editor, and link previews that don't break the
visual rhythm. The hashtag system replaces folders — #thesis,
#thesis/relativity, #playground/half-baked — and every tag you
use becomes navigation.
Bear is at its best when you're brainstorming around a line of argument rather than a list of tasks. You type a paragraph, link to three earlier notes, drop in an image, and Bear keeps the structure legible without forcing you to commit to a hierarchy first. iCloud sync is fast, the Mac and iPhone editors agree on every keystroke, and the iOS share sheet feeds new fragments in from Safari and Drafts without ceremony.
03 · APPLE
Notion — when the brainstorm needs a database underneath it.
Notion is the heavy machinery in this list. You can absolutely brainstorm in Notion the way you brainstorm anywhere else — type into a blank page, ignore the toolbar — and it works fine. The reason it's here is what happens after the page is full: the toggle into a database view, the cross-page references, the property tagging, the linked block that lives in three places at once.
Bring Notion into a brainstorm when the ideas you're collecting have shape — a research project with sources, a product spec with constraints, a class outline with weeks. Don't bring it in when the answer is a poem. The mobile editor is now usable on iPhone in a way it wasn't two years ago, and the AI features are useful for compressing a long unstructured page into a short ordered one once the brainstorm is over.
04 · APPLE
Things 3 — the place ideas go when they need to become Tuesday.
Things isn't a brainstorming app. It's the room next door. Once one of those Drafts captures or Bear paragraphs has a verb in it ("call the registrar", "draft the cover letter", "write the part about Mercury"), Things is where it goes to actually become a thing that gets done.
We mention it in a brainstorm article because every serious brainstorm produces residue — small, scheduleable jobs that only matter if they survive contact with next Tuesday. Things' Magic Plus, area structure, and dead-simple Today list are the cleanest mechanism we've seen for that handoff. Pair it with the Drafts "send to Things" action and the loop closes itself.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Pick two of these, not four. Drafts is the inbox; Bear is the room; Notion is the database; Things is the next-Tuesday list. Most people brainstorming on an iPhone need an inbox plus exactly one of the other three, and the choice depends on whether the ideas you're collecting want a line of argument, a structure, or a deadline.
Einstein, given a Mac, would have used Drafts. We're confident.