Useful Apps for Freelance Writers — Use Your Phone as a Computer to Make a Living
The market-share of smartphone users in Pakistan has surpassed the numbers of feature-phone users. When an always connected tool is made available to a vast majority of people, their hard-earned money is stolen through a number of ways like classic robo-call scams, SIM swap attacks and ponzy schemes like Forsage. What if I tell you that you can use your very own phone to earn extra as an employee or as a fresh graduate? Yes, you can as a freelance writer, especially as a graduate of English Literature. Though finding genuine freelance work is tough, yet with enough digging on popular Facebook groups, you are able to find work.
Anyways, here is the list of apps which shall help you in writing (entirely) on-the-go:
Collaboration: In remote freelance jobs, collaboration is the key which unlocks productivity. Apps like Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Sheets can keep your thoughts and opinions in sync with your remote peers.
Text files: Notepad (.txt) files hold a great significance in the field of freelance writing but we cannot create and view .txt files directly in our smartphones. But one app by the name of “Editor” on F-Droid can act as both a .txt viewer and editor. This ridiculously small (300 kBs only) and Open Source app has a built-in file browser. I shall write a dedicated post on this app in the upcoming days.
Office Apps: Google Docs and Sheets require internet to work but what about offline document processing? MS Office is available as a stand-alone app with a built-in scanner and then we have WPS Office as the most feature-packed document processor with PDF manipulation tools. However if you want free and open source office suit for your word processing and spreadsheet needs then you can try OnlyOffice, available on both GitHub and Play Store.
Project Tracking: You might be managing multiple writing jobs or similar jobs under one job. It is essential to keep track of the progress and deadlines of your projects so that they are delivered in time. There is an app by the name “Project Manager” on the Play Store. This app lets you add projects, subprojects alongside their respective deadlines and categorization of different projects based on labels, all offline! It even has support for local backup and restore!
SEO: If you run a website, you may have already installed Google Analytics app on your phone to track your site’s performance. However, there is an app known as “Metatags Analyzer” can serve as a MozBar alternative (minus Spam Scores, DA etc). Though you cannot copy meta tag information from this app.
LLMs: Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Claude can be used in brainstorming new ideas for your blog (posts). They can also be used to generate promotional drafts for your blog or website. Since LLMs are just advanced text suggesting engines, devoid of intelligence and sentience (yet), you shall have to proofread, fact-check and fix the rough edges of the write-ups written by LLMs in case if you decide use that written material in public. My go-to app for utilizing LLMs is Poe by Quora as it combines multiple chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and PaLM into one. Though there is the official app available for ChatGPT but the version of ChatGPT on Poe is based on ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo (a ChatGPT Plus Model) that is made available for free on Poe and is more capable than vinila ChatGPT. Besides, I have found Claude better in creative tasks than GPT 3.5.
Conclusion: With the right tools paired with right skill-set, you can turn addictive doom-scrolling into your monetary extension.
