Simplenote 4 Review

Version 4 of Simplenote was released on iOS 7 day. It is exactly the update that I was waiting for.

Simplenote was the first third-party note app that I used on my iPhone. It was so great that I happily paid the $20 yearly charge for Premium. The killer feature of Simplenote was sync. Fast , flawless sync. My notes were everywhere I needed them to be without requiring any work on my part.

If you aren't a long-time iPhone user, you may scoff at that. Sure, iCloud and Dropbox sync are the norm now. A few years ago? Not so much. Remember, iCloud didn't even exist until 2011.

The folks behind Simplenote pushed out updates at their own pace, and they were not very fast. As I understand it , they spent more time on the sync engine than the app itself. Compared with the flood of text editors / note apps on iOS today, they had fallen behind.

Until iOS 7 day, I had been using Byword as much as Simplenote. Then Version 4 was released, and everything changed.

The interface, by no means cluttered, was drastically simplified. There are only two options now.¹ The lone font is Source Sans Pro. It looks fantastic. Links are a muted shade of blue. There are no Markdown preview or HTML export options. If this really makes you sad, I don't think you understand the spirit of Markdown.

When I open a text editor on my iPhone, I want to see a list of notes, a search box, and a button to create a new file. Simplenote gives me exactly that. And Simplenote still uses the first line of your note as the title — this is something that all iOS text editors should do.

For now, Simplenote remains free. The developers aren't sure about the future of the subscription. I hope they figure out a way to make that work — they need to remain profitable. This simply isn't an app I want to go without.