Does the iPhone really have better writing apps? For SOP drafting, the answer is yes, but not for the reason you think. It is not the beautiful indie editors. It is the boring infrastructure underneath.
Google Docs on iOS is as good as it gets for the main draft. Clean, fast, and your reviewer can comment from any device. Notion is the planning layer: one workspace, one page per university, program research living next to your draft fragments. This separation matters more than people realize. Research and writing are different modes. Mixing them is how drafts stall.
Templates deserve a careful word. A university specific SOP template app can help with structure if you use it right. The right way: borrow the outline, ignore the sample sentences. The wrong way: fill in the blanks and submit. Admissions readers have seen every popular template. They recognize the shape instantly, and the shape is not a compliment.
Version control is the unsexy hero. iOS makes it dangerously easy to overwrite a good paragraph with a worse one. An SOP version tracking SaaS, or simply disciplined use of Docs version history, means yesterday's better draft is always recoverable. Name your versions like you mean it. "Draft 3" is not a name. "Draft 3, childhood paragraph cut" is. Future you, juggling eight universities, will be grateful.
For review, a statement of purpose review app gives you a fast second opinion on clarity before the human review. Useful. Not sufficient. And any SOP editor app on iOS or Android gets judged the same way: clean export, offline access, no essay-writing promises.
The apps get you to a strong generic draft. The tailoring packs at sopexpert.fyi get you to a strong specific one.