Libreto is live. After a long stretch in beta and review, it is now available to download on the App Store. It is the studio's most ambitious app so far, because it sets out to do something most apps avoid: bring your creative side and your organized side into one place, without nickel and diming you for each piece. Download Libreto on the App Store.
What Libreto actually is
Most note apps pick a lane. Libreto runs four at once. There is a real drawing studio, a full notebook and planner system, a journal, and a complete PDF editor, and they live in the same app and the same library. You can sketch a layered canvas in the morning, keep a hyperlinked planner through the day, and sign a PDF before dinner, all without switching tools or paying three separate subscriptions.
The drawing studio
The canvas supports layers with blend modes and per-layer opacity, and ships with 56 brushes across 8 categories, sketching, inking, painting, airbrushing, textures, and more. There are smudge, eraser, selection, and transform tools, plus adjustments like blur, noise, sharpen, bloom, halftone, and chromatic aberration. You can drop a photo straight onto a canvas to trace or paint over it, and there is a separate whiteboard for quick, freeform brainstorming when you do not want a full project.
Notebooks, planners, and journals
The planner side is built around hyperlinks, so you can jump between year, months, weeks, and days with a tap. There is a large template library for work, study, finance, and fitness, a sticker library that accepts your own imported packs, custom cover designs, and audio recording right on the page. Apple Pencil is treated as a first-class citizen here, with pressure, tilt, hover, double-tap, and squeeze support, alongside a ruler, shape tools, and palette customization.
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A real PDF editor, not an afterthought
Libreto handles PDFs the way a dedicated app would. You can highlight, underline, ink, add shapes, sticky notes, and text boxes, sign documents with saved signatures, and fill out forms. On the page-management side there are tools to rotate, crop, merge, split, extract, compress, watermark, and password protect. There is a document scanner built in, plus on-device handwriting search and convert-to-text that works in both English and Spanish, so your handwritten notes stay findable.
Privacy and one honest price
Libreto follows the same rules as the rest of the studio's apps. Your work stays on your device and syncs through your own iCloud, there is a Face ID app lock, and there is no third-party tracking, no analytics, and no data sales. The handwriting recognition runs on device rather than shipping your pages to a server.
Pricing is deliberately simple. Libreto Premium is 7.99 dollars per year, with a 3-day free trial, or 0.99 dollars per month. The price you see is the price you pay, with every feature unlocked and no in-app purchases layered on top. That is a conscious contrast with note apps that charge around 15 dollars a month and premium PDF apps that run close to 180 dollars a year. The subscription funds a steady stream of new brushes, tools, and planner and journal designs.
Who it is for
Libreto is at its best on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, where the drawing and handwriting tools really stretch out, and it works on iPhone too for quick capture and PDF work on the go. If you have been paying for a separate sketch app, a separate planner, and a separate PDF tool, Libreto is built to replace all three for one yearly price.
You can get Libreto now on the App Store. For the rest of the studio's privacy-first, on-device apps, the full lineup is at jcmobileappstudio.com, and the Sunday newsletter covers each new release.
JC Mobile App Studio