Most social media apps ask what you are doing right now, and by tomorrow your post is buried under everyone else’s. ThingsBook is built on the opposite instinct.

It is a text-first social platform and journaling app where every post is filed into a collection, whether that is books, movies, travel, food, fashion, or a hobby, so your profile slowly becomes a catalogue of what you love instead of a timeline you scroll past.

There are no character limits, no pressure to post a polished photo, and no feed rushing your writing off the screen before anyone has read it.

The easiest way to see the idea at work is with books. You scan a barcode or type in an ISBN, and the app pulls in the details and cover art without any manual typing, after which you can write a review, attach photos, and update your reading progress as you go.

The result is a visual library of what you consume and how you feel about it, with a to-be-read pile sitting next to the finished favourites. Movies, podcasts, and anything else worth keeping get the same treatment, each in its own collection.

Every post can be public, shared with chosen friends, or kept entirely private, which lets the same app serve as a diary, a reading log, or a small book club depending on who you let in.

Compared with Goodreads for books or Letterboxd for films, ThingsBook puts those habits under one roof and gives them room for proper writing.

ThingsBook

ThingsBook has no ads, no subscriptions, and no in-app purchases, and features that other apps would lock behind a paywall, including AI background removal for photos, editing tools, and smart writing prompts, are free for everyone.

It goes a step further with a Writers Program that pays $10 for each approved long-form post, up to $300 in total, alongside themed writing contests, some run with partners like Webtoon and Wattpad that carry cash rewards or platform perks.

The Writers Program is open only to users aged 18 and above in the US and Canada, so writers in Kenya are left to write for love rather than money. It also leaves an obvious question hanging over the app, which is how long a platform with no ads and no subscriptions can keep paying people to write.

ThingsBook holds a rating of 4.5 on the App Store from 1,900 ratings and has passed 100,000 downloads on the Play Store.

For a platform built around slow, private writing rather than viral sharing, that is a healthy early following, and the App Store score suggests the people who have found it are happy with what they got.

ThingsBook suits people who already keep lists, whether a to-be-read pile, a watch log or a running tally of places they have eaten, and would rather keep them somewhere that reads like a journal than a spreadsheet.

It is also a gentler home for anyone tired of performing for a feed, because the default is writing for yourself and sharing only when you feel like it. As with any newer social platform, the people on it will decide how lively it feels, but since posts can be kept private, the archive is useful even before anyone else shows up.