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I’ll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me from the word go.
If you’re a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god’s sake don’t let Samsung install you as a ‘system’ app…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.
I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all the structure and organization that so many other note taking apps/services provide really just make things more complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just search by keyword and usually I'll find it. My one gripe with Notes…
Not to mention that it avoids me onboarding to some unprofitable note taking tool that will languish until it gets stripped for parts.
There was a midtwit meme about productivity hackers vs "I just use apple notes" guys like this too haha.
I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.
From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.
It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.
Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.
Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new platform for tasks and notes because Evernote’s free tier is quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn’t even show the correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading about Evernote’s profitability last night.
Reminders has been perpetually flakey, particularly around new OS releases and if your iPhone/Watch/iPad/Mac are in different states of latest vs non-latest OS.
“let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:
- Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)
- Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)
- Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth
- Convert those new downloads to paying users
- Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization
- Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition
- Lather, rinse, repeat
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.
Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”
https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter. I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.
I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do not want.
I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. Sometimes I want to share notes. I don’t want to collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private thoughts and journal entries.
Evernote stopped focusing on that.
I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local first and uses cdrt for sync.
> And enterprises of great pith and moment, > With this regard, their currents turn awry, > And lose the name of action.
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
I was employee #3 at original Evernote, when we were just implementing that brilliant idea.
Here is the photo of pretty much precise moment when Evernote was born: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...
on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.
Bear should have been ported to Android and Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.
I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote eventually recovered and kicked us out. Just my personal piece of nostalgia.
[0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search