notesnook.com Reviews 6

I chose Notesnook year ago because it was important to me that my notes could encrypted with password becos the typical way the police catch "risky" people in my country is by confiscating their phones to check their messages and notes and I have a lot of "risky" stuff there lol. Last update made app locking with password only available with a subscription. This app no longer protects privacy...

My friend, a political activist, lives in Russia. She relied on Notesnook largely because it offered a password lock and end-to-end encryption. Yet a recent update turned app locking into a Pro-only feature.

The app's slogan on the main page is «No spying, no tracking, no bullshit. Just notes.». No bullshit? Charging for something as basic as a password lock is comparable to putting end-to-end encryption behind a paywall. On their main page they even emphasize — «The *private* workspace for your life» — leaving behind people who can’t afford a Pro subscription. Notable, that my friend wrote developers an email about it — separate one for each of them — and never got an answer.

App lock doesn’t require ongoing extra resources, so gating it behind a subscription looks like pure greed. The company should restrict features that actually consume resources—like available storage or allowed upload size—not essentially free options like app lock (or even the number of colors).

Do not use Notesnook — company that monetizes privacy.

This company is a big scam, through another channel you are lured in, you pay money, and then you suddenly come to their site with a contract that costs you money every month, then you can cancel it, but you have lost the money!!

I think the concept is wonderful. However, it is not accompanied by the reality.

In a word, I think it is still in alpha version.

Techlore and privacytools.io recommend it, but they may only know the concept and specifications. The following are my impressions after more than two years of use.

The biggest problem for me is that the attachments would have been lost forever. First of all, according to the specifications of notesnook, images and attachments are downloaded from notesnook server every time when you open a note. However, certain attachments fail to download. A mixture of failed and successful files even within the same note. (This is same in V2 and V3 current version). The problem is that the downloading of files is not always successful. Perhaps there is a fundamental bug around the DataBase. Maybe 10% of all files disappear. You can tell if an image has disappeared by opening the note, but you cannot tell if an attachment has disappeared until you open it, which is quite bad. I contacted support and got no response. It cannot be used for the purpose of storing information, even if it is not text.

The next problem is the unstable search function. Even if the full title of the note is entered as a search keyword, it may not appear in the search results. And basically, only alphanumeric characters are supported for keywords. From the forums, it seems that Chinese and Japanese search is not good at all. This makes it unsuitable for such purposes as “to search across a large number of notebooks with one keyword. The search results differ between the PC version and the SP version.

There are still other minor bugs. For example, the keyword search function (both for the entire notebook and within a notebook) stops working after using the application for a while, perhaps because it runs out of resources. The folder names (=notebook names) that appear in the notebook list are associated with something completely different.

Problems that once appeared to have been resolved often reappear.