Some weeks we straighten out a lot of small things. And some weeks a sentence becomes true that we haven't been able to say for months. This was the second kind: OutaStory is now on the App Store — for iPhone and iPad. For the first time, we're at home everywhere people read: on the web, on Android, on Windows, on Fire tablets, on the Mac, and now on iPhone and iPad too.
If you're reading this on an iPhone: you can install OutaStory from the App Store now and stop keeping a browser tab open.
But that was far from all of it. It was an unusually dense week — the cover designer has become a genuine studio, AI covers are finally covers rather than pretty pictures, Premium recognises you reliably, our genre shelf got considerably deeper, and a handful of very quiet bugs in writing were found and fixed. One at a time.
Six routes into the same library
The iPhone and iPad edition was the last missing piece. It sat in review for a long time — considerably longer than we expected — and it's now approved. It's a single purchase across iPhone, iPad and Mac: if you have the app on one Apple device, you have it on all of them.
So the map now looks like this:
- Web — www.outastory.com, on anything with a browser
- iPhone & iPad — App Store (new)
- Mac — Mac App Store
- Android — Google Play
- Windows — Microsoft Store
- Fire tablets & Fire TV — Amazon Appstore
On top of that, the Samsung Galaxy Store and Uptodown, for anyone who prefers running their Android device without Google. Every badge on our apps page now points at the right store — and no app points at a store it isn't in.
While we were there, we also straightened out the "a new version is available" notice. It used to be one global value for everyone, which is guaranteed to go wrong the moment one store approves faster than another: you get told to fetch a version that store hasn't published yet. Now every platform knows its own current version and its own store.
The cover designer has become a real studio
Until recently, the cover designer was a tool for putting a title on top of an image. It is now a place where you actually build a cover.
- A dedicated full-screen workspace. Opening the designer leaves the normal page structure behind: no navigation, no header, no page scrolling. Tools on the left, properties on the right, the canvas in the middle — and it's now as large as your screen allows. Before, it was constrained to the width of a form page and was absurdly small on a large monitor.
- Layers, the way you'd expect them. Text, shapes and images stack as layers, with a panel to reorder, rename, hide, lock, duplicate and delete. Up to 40 layers, of which up to eight can be images.
- Ten shapes — rectangle, ellipse, triangle, line, star, polygon, banner, badge, corner flash and speech bubble — each with a solid or gradient fill, corner radius, opacity, shadow and outline.
- Gradients, linear or radial, with up to four colour stops — as a background or as a shape fill.
- Image layers with filters — brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and blur, plus six one-click presets (black & white, sepia, vintage, cool, warm, high contrast). A 50% corner radius turns an image into a circle.
- Forty type families — serif, sans, display, handwriting and monospace — with size, colour, alignment, bold/italic/underline, rotation, a shadow and a separately coloured outline.
- Handles, not number fields. Eight resize handles, a rotation grip, arrow keys for nudging — and snapping to edges, thirds, centre, safe margins and every other layer. Hold Alt to place something freely.
- Undo and redo across 50 steps, with Ctrl/Cmd+Z working everywhere — not only when the pointer happens to be over the canvas.
- Ten earlier versions per cover, as thumbnails, each with a button to bring it back.
Two things mattered to us here. First: the preview is the result. What you see on the canvas is exactly what the server renders — there's no surprise between "looks good" and "saved". Second, that preview is now about four times faster and sixteen times lighter. And edits that don't need a typing pause — a checkbox, a colour, reordering a layer — now appear almost instantly instead of sitting out a delay designed for typed text. The interface also says when something is happening: previously saving gave you less feedback than previewing, while doing strictly more.
And one thing that was genuinely embarrassing: every cover the designer produced used to carry a scrollbar inside the OutaStory mark. Both stored logo images were screenshots — complete with a scrollbar track down the right edge and another along the bottom, which were then dutifully composited into the finished image. That's fixed; the graphics were re-rendered cleanly from the vector original. Re-saving an affected cover gives you a clean one immediately.
AI covers that are already covers
Until now, an AI round returned an image. Often a beautiful image — but only an image: composed edge to edge, with no calm area where a title could go. You got art, and you had to turn it into a book cover yourself.
That's changed. An AI round now returns a finished, fully editable cover: artwork, a title set across several styled text layers, and an author credit — in one of twelve book-cover layouts, from a classic serif top to a lower colour band. The typography is planned before the image exists, so the image knows which area has to stay quiet. The text colours are then measured against the pixels that actually came out, so the text is readable on that specific image rather than in theory.
Importantly: the result isn't a finished picture you have to accept, it's an ordinary layer document. Open it in the designer, rearrange it, recolour it, throw layers away, or strip it back to the bare image. And every draft gets one free round on reaching the cover step, without pressing anything.
One detail we found while trying it ourselves: on some covers the author credit was nearly invisible — dark type on a dark image. The reason was that it inherited the title's colour, which had been measured somewhere else entirely on the image. The author credit is now measured where it actually sits.
And for the rest of the catalogue: real covers at last
A large share of our library is mirrored classics and seeded starter stories. Roughly 9,400 published stories carried a category motif with no title and no author name — pretty, but interchangeable. Those are the same images that go into our newsletters, the story of the day and the daily social posts.
From now on they get real covers, gradually, with a title and an author, in even portions — 25 stories per run, every night. So it takes a while; if you browse the catalogue over the coming weeks, it will get better-looking step by step.
One promise that matters to us here: a story a person wrote is never touched. Eligibility is decided purely by where a story came from — never by what its cover currently looks like. Your cover stays your cover, even if you're using a category motif today.
Premium now recognises you reliably
This is the kind of bug that's hardest to see yourself, because you only notice it if you happen to be in the right role.
Internally, Premium had two independent proofs: your actual subscription on one side, a marker on your account on the other. Both were valid, both were being set — just not always both at once, and usually only one of them was checked. The result: someone who had paid could still see ads, get no downloads, or read "Premium only" on a Premium feature, while their own profile correctly showed them as a Premium member.
Now either proof counts on its own — on the server and in the app. In practice: if you pay, you're Premium. The ads go, the downloads work, read-along is there. And if you read offline, your downloaded library stays yours even when there's no connection.
Fire tablets: Premium and credits directly in the app
On Fire tablets and Fire TV, Premium couldn't be bought inside the app at all — the purchase simply went nowhere. That's fixed: the Amazon edition now sells Premium and credit packs through the Amazon Appstore, using the payment route the device already knows, the payment method already on file, and the management screen you already use for everything else.
So the same principle now holds on every platform: you buy where you are — on the web through our checkout, in the Android app through Google Play, in the Apple app through the App Store, on a Fire tablet through the Amazon Appstore. And access bought anywhere applies everywhere.
In the same pass, we split every legal text, help article and FAQ answer so that each edition of the app only describes the payment route that actually exists there. Before this, someone in the Amazon app might read about Google Play — which isn't just against the rules, it's simply untrue.
For everyone who writes: four quiet bugs, found and fixed
We write this section with particular reluctance and particular pleasure. Reluctance, because these were real bugs. Pleasure, because we found every one of them through authors telling us — and because not one of them ever produced an error message. They were all silent.
The editor could swallow keystrokes. In the worst case everything looked entirely normal — you type, the words appear — but none of it reached the save. No autosave, no error, no hint. The cause was a connecting step between the writing surface and the app whose failure was simply thrown away. That now reports itself instead of staying quiet — and three related places where a failed save went unnoticed were repaired at the same time.
Two typed paragraphs could merge into one. In a new chapter, two lines with an Enter between them could be saved glued together with no separation at all. The reason lies deep in how browsers store paragraphs in writing surfaces — our clean-up routine didn't know that particular form and dropped the separation while tidying. Fixed. Chapters already saved that way don't repair themselves, though; those need a quick edit.
Blank lines used as scene breaks never arrived. If you set two blank lines to break a scene, the reader showed exactly what it shows for an ordinary paragraph — the distinction was gone. That was originally deliberate, so that pasted text couldn't tear huge gaps into a page, but it was the wrong call. From now on: one blank line stays one, two blank lines survive as a scene break, and anything longer is capped at two. And because this is a change to how text is displayed, it applies retroactively: already-published stories show their blank lines again, with nothing to re-upload.
In seven categories, publishing was impossible. Choosing "Autobiography", for instance, produced a message saying the category required an age rating of 14 — and 14 was never on the form's list. A requirement that could not be met, permanently, with no way around it. It was reported to us by an author trying to publish the life story of his late wife. The rule now has a single definition and has been corrected for every affected category; four already-published stories carrying a wrong age rating were repaired automatically. The fact that the error appeared in English to an author writing in German is fixed too — every message from the publishing flow is now translated.
And one closely related to it: editing an already-released episode of a serial landed you on a new, unpublished version — where the entire release interface vanished without a word. You clicked, and "unfortunately nothing happens". There's now an explanation with a route back, and the "Not released yet" marker is a button that actually does something.
New: daily writing prompts
One thing that's entirely new, and that we're rather pleased about: writing prompts.
The idea is simple. Every night the platform looks at which films and TV episodes came out that day, picks the ones that genuinely stir something culturally, and turns each into a small nudge to write — its own page with its own generated hero image, at /prompts/… and findable through search.
Two things matter to us about it.
First: it is always about your own story. A prompt reads like "Write the finale you'd have wanted — in your own universe", never "Write a sequel to …". The release supplies the moment and the mood, not the characters. That isn't a nicety, it's a deliberate line: we invite original work, not someone else's.
Second: these pages are entirely written and illustrated by an AI — and they say so. Visibly on the page, machine-readably in the image, and in the same way in any email that ever comes out of them. We'd consider that obvious regardless of the fact that it became European law this month.
To start with, prompts appear only as pages. Deliberately, no email goes out yet — not until we've spent a week reading what actually comes out of it. If there are emails later, it'll be at most one per person per week, and only matched to what you already enjoy reading.
A deeper shelf: from 543 to 713 categories
Our genre tree had branches that led nowhere: eleven shelves looked like shelves and were empty the moment you clicked into them. There are now 170 new categories — purely additive. Nothing was renamed, nothing moved, nothing reordered; every existing link keeps working exactly as before.
Newly built out, among others:
- Non-fiction, using the split the German book trade itself uses between narrative non-fiction, knowledge and practical guides
- Fan fiction, including a musicals branch of its own
- Poetry — from classical form through narrative to performance and contemporary
- Historical fiction by era, including the postwar period
- Literary fiction, contemporary fiction, women's fiction, social novel
- and expanded branches across paranormal, drama, LGBTQ, teen fiction, werewolf, humour, short story, new adult and romantic fantasy
Plus one entirely new top-level shelf: Heimat & Country Life. The German Heimatroman simply didn't fit anywhere — sometimes historical, sometimes contemporary, rarely literary in intent, and not necessarily carrying a love story. It now has a home of its own.
All 713 categories carry a name and a description in German and English, and every new category brings its own cover artwork — 1,360 new images in total.
One more thing that matters if you write: we looked very carefully at which of the new categories should carry an age limit at all. Only seven do. The reason is the bug described further up — a badly chosen age value on a category excludes precisely the stories that category exists for.
Help that actually answers
Our help library grew sharply this week: from 29 to 69 articles, and from 59 to around 150 FAQ entries across nine categories, bilingual throughout. Four topic areas — covers, privacy & data, apps & platforms, and community — had no articles at all and therefore never appeared on /help in the first place.
Going through it, we found that some of the older copy simply described things that never existed here — a playback speed control, highlights and notes, weekly reading reminders, a child mode. All corrected: the help now describes the platform that actually exists. We also moved the German copy consistently to the informal "du" — there were corners where we still addressed readers formally while the rest of the platform didn't.
Also reworked: everything around deleting your account. The old description disagreed with reality in several places — it claimed, among other things, that signing back in cancels the deletion (it doesn't; there's an explicit button for that) and that we'd get in touch within 30 days (we don't). It now says what actually happens. And the deletion flow in the prominent place in your profile now explicitly asks what should happen to your published stories, instead of quietly making that decision for you.
And so that people can find us at all
An invisible but important block: our blog and help pages were effectively unfindable for search engines, in several independent ways at once. Of 34 blog posts, only five were reachable by a link at all; help articles served search engines an empty page instead of their content; German posts were being indexed with English content; and several addresses answered "everything's fine" where "doesn't exist" would have been the correct answer. All of that is fixed, including a complete, properly linked blog archive.
None of it changes the site for you — but it's the difference between "we exist" and "we can be found".
Where things stand
- Six platforms — web, iPhone/iPad, Mac, Android, Windows and Fire tablets. For the first time with no gap.
- Over 9,000 stories in the catalogue, in German and English — from classics of world literature to new voices.
- 713 categories across 25 top-level shelves, named and described in both languages.
- 69 help articles and around 150 FAQ entries, bilingual.
- Twelve releases this week — unusually dense, because a lot of it was small enough to reach you straight away.
- Four notes from authors, which turned into five fixed bugs.
What comes next
Three things are at the top of the list.
First: we're going to read the writing prompts ourselves for a week before any of them reach an inbox. What comes out decides whether and how this continues.
Second: the real covers for the mirrored catalogue run through in portions. That takes a few weeks — so the catalogue gets better-looking gradually, not overnight.
Third: we're staying on speed. The home page was the most obvious place, but not the only one; the reading view and the catalogue get the same treatment.
And otherwise, what this week demonstrated four times over still holds: tell us what looks odd. We'd probably have missed the editor bugs and the blocked publishing path for months without those emails. They didn't break anything loudly. They were just quiet — which is exactly why your emails are worth so much.
Thank you for reading, for writing, and for looking closely.