I grew up on a manual typewriter, the same one my mom used to write articles for Life Magazine in the ’50s and ’60s. It was a small portable in a beat-up canvas case, and you had to hit the keys hard.

Welcome to the technological frontier of 2014: Dueling typewriter apps for the iPad. The upstart rival, Typing Writer, was launched in July by The Rumpus. The literary website’s founder, Stephen ...