I grew up watching my dad do the back-page crossword every morning, pen in hand, tea going cold. When I went looking for an app version of that ritual I could recommend to him, I couldn't find one. The App Store is full of puzzle games, but almost all of them shout at you. Pop-ups. Adverts. Cartoon sound effects. Countdown timers. It felt like none of them were made for anybody my parents' age.
So I made Wordalo.
The brief
Six classic puzzle types: crossword, word search, anagram, fill-in, word connect, and codeword. Big type. Clean grids. British cluing. No adverts anywhere in the app, ever. A look that borrows from the broadsheet puzzle pages I remember rather than the candy-bright palette of a free-to-play game.
I wanted the app to feel like an edition. The running issue number in the corner, a word of the day, a fresh daily challenge every morning. Like something you'd pick up and put down, not something that demands your attention.
Why Manchester
Because I live here. I'm not trying to turn that into a story about industrial heritage or printing presses, but it does happen to be the city that made the Guardian, so it's not a bad place from which to make a British puzzle paper.
Every puzzle in Wordalo is themed. Royal Britain. Tea and biscuits. The countryside. Classic cinema. Fifty of them in all, with about five thousand hand-chosen words behind them. Most of these lists took a long time to write. Some of them needed help from friends who know more about birds or gardens than I do.
What the app doesn't do
No adverts. Not banners, not interstitials, not the apologetic kind that ask you to watch a video for a free hint. The app also doesn't track you. Your progress lives on your device and in your own iCloud account. There's no server logging what you solve or how quickly.
A few more things it doesn't do: panic you with countdowns, punish you with streak loss on a busy week (subscribers get automatic streak forgiveness), ask you to rate it thirty seconds in, or pop confetti cannons when you solve a puzzle. The app says "solved" and moves on.
The printable broadsheet
One feature I'm genuinely proud of: subscribers can generate a fresh four-page puzzle paper every morning and AirPrint it. Word search on page one, crossword on page two, anagrams on page three, solutions on the back. A lot of the people the app is for prefer solving on paper. It seemed rude not to meet them there.
How it's built
Wordalo is written in Swift and SwiftUI. Typography sets in New York for headlines and Charter for body text, both serifs built for long reading. The wordmark runs "Word" in black and "alo" in vermilion, which is a colour I chose because it's the same red used on a certain newspaper masthead in London. Make of that what you will.
The app launched in April 2026 in the United Kingdom. It's £2.99 a month, with a three-day free trial and individual themed packs as one-off purchases. It runs on iPhone and iPad from iOS 17 onwards.
What I care about
- Respect the reader. No dark patterns, no manufactured urgency, no guilt-trip streak notifications.
- Care about the type. If a clue is worth reading, it's worth setting well.
- Make the grid comfortable. Cells should feel spacious, not cramped.
- Keep it quiet. No noisy animations, no confetti, no nagging.
- Keep the data on the device. Privacy isn't a policy page, it's an architecture decision.
Say hello
If you've got feedback, questions or a bug to report, I'd like to hear from you. Email hello@wordalo.app or fill in the contact form. I read everything and try to reply within a day or two.