Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

There's no question that Paper is a better pure writing experience. If you're viewing Notion as just a note-taking app and nothing else, I think you're misunderstanding what it's for.

For starters, it's way easier to organize stuff in Notion than Paper. This is less a feature of Notion, and more of a terrible limitation of Paper. Paper was stuck with the "files within folders" model. Just the fact that Notion lets you control what shows up in the navigation sidebar was a huge time saver for me. And being able to create pages within pages within pages (which is very different from having sibling documents inside a folder) made it much more flexible for organizing everything.

But the real power of Notion is when you start to treat it as a database builder rather than a note-taking tool. Yes, it's useful for taking notes, but those notes are about something, and with tools like Paper, Obsidian, etc., the thing is always living somewhere else.

With Notion, I was able to make a database of projects and another database of tasks which linked to those projects. Each developer on my team has a custom dashboard showing just the tasks that are assigned to them and currently in-progress. I have a totally different view showing all the projects going on right now. And then each of those tasks have a pretty good (I admit it's not great) note-taking feature. The notes are living within the actual object you're taking notes about, which is totally different from Paper.

I even use Notion for personal stuff. I have a Notion form that my wife and I use to enter things we need to buy next time we're at the store. And there's a view showing the things we need to buy from each separate store with checkboxes next to each one so it's easy to remove them when we're done. There's a separate database listing the movies we want to watch, with a view for all the ones we previously watched, and when. I have a database of cocktail recipes along with ingredient lists (so I can easily filter by ingredient), formulas to calculate different volumes based on how many drinks you're making, a rating system, etc.

Basically, if you look at Notion as a bucket of unstructured notes with a markdown editor, I agree, it's nothing special. But that's not what it really is.

For a while, I could edit “paper files” that other team members created, and I could create paper docs on the old version (to the utter confusion of my team members), but I couldn’t create new paper files without duplicating a team member’s doc and deleting the content.

Now when I visit paper.Dropbox.com, all of my “old paper” docs are completely missing and I see an empty list (of what I presume are old-style docs.) :( I have local backups, but like, what’s the point of maintaining two separate services with the same name for five years?

Edit: Apparently my account was migrated in December 2024. I don’t know why the old interface is still accessible to me. A redirect or a message like “Check your ‘Migrated Paper Docs’ folder” would go a long way instead of showing an hauntingly empty list.

(I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)