I am consistently shocked at how bad Apple Notes is. I like the features it has and I like the iCloud sync between devices... I use it daily. But it's so damn buggy. It's a notes app! Why do new lines on a moderately-long note cause half the text to disappear until I hit the carriage return a few times?
I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.
I think apple cares a lot less than it used to and it’s been like that for a while. There are long standing bugs or missing features on iOS that are just there and have been for years.
I guess they don’t have to try as hard anymore, so they don’t.
It feels like they are spread way too thin, and individual teams are not allowed to improve their app/services/parts on their own. If I had to work on Apple Notes I would have several suggestions, not all worthy of work of-course, but letting a lot of apps go stagnant is something else entirely.
Apple used to have to roll-their-own to hedge their bets. For example, Safari and iWork came about when there was a possibility that Microsoft would pull support for IE and Office for Mac.
Still need people to press buttons though. But I feel too many decisions have to go through a tiny set of people. But I have no insights into the org. I do wish they would do more smaller releases. Like update Notes without a full OS update.
When they're making billions from their cut on app store sales and receiving billions from Google to do nothing, and people buy their devices anyway, why would Apple care?
If people keep buying your devices anyway it's feedback to the company management that the customers aren't bothered and you can keep doing what you're doing, so there's no reason to change anything. It's the PRO of being a monopoly and a money printer.
The more you rely on abstracted (and sometimes leaky) tools—like Swift versus Objective-C, or SwiftUI versus its predecessors—the more likely you are to feel helpless when something goes wrong.
I think the fact it's buggy but you still use it daily (when there are so many other options) goes to show how good it is! Personally it's the app I use more than any other. I don't run in to too many issues but I have experienced the one you mention about text disappearing. On Mac there are also some really annoying issues with the dictionary (sometimes it lets me 'learn' a work, other times no option) and grammar checks (completely wrong).
>> I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.
Isn't this the default behaviour in all rich text apps? I think CMD+SHFT+OPTION+V pastes without preserving formatting.
I find that combination very annoying to press personally. It's possible to change the hotkey by going to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts ... > App Shortcuts, and then under 'All Applications' adding a shortcut for the menu title 'Paste and Match Style' (I suppose it would be different if the OS language is not set to English).
I agree with the person you are responding to though, I would really prefer if 'match style' was the default OS-wide, and there was an option to preserve formatting with a hotkey instead.
I wonder if younger people are aware of keyboard shortcuts? Growing up using primarily phones and tablets it might be less of a thing. I saw a TikTok recently explaining copy/paste shortcuts like it was a hack and people were amazed in the comments.
I wouldn't say it's "damn buggy" — I use Notes daily, and have a significant number of notes that are synced between devices. In my notes I use rich formatting, embed videos, voice memos and lots of images. It handles it really well. I even use iCloud Collaboration feature on a few notes for planning, and for splitting regular expenses
I have three notes that exhibit the bug you mention though: the three notes I keep for each of my children's artwork. I scan the artwork using the document scanning tool in Notes, and it gets embedded as a multi-page PDF (if the artwork itself has multiple parts) or a single PDF. After many years of adding high-res scans, when I scroll to the bottom of these files it takes some time for the note to render. I think I picked the wrong tool for the job here, more than anything!
Seems to be the way with lots of apps Apple produces these days. They do the bare minimum, leave them a decade then quietly add in a feature that should've existed on day one and likely took a single dev a couple of hours to add support for.
It is really incredible how Apple has obviously broken and buggy UX in many primary use cases on their devices, and fail to fix it for generations.
The iPad is particularly bad in this respect. For a decade it would not support the most obvious use case for a device like this: Have it in portrait mode like a notebook, show a video or book app on the top half and notes app on the bottom half. A use case that was solved by the original Macintosh. The most infuriating thing was that you could split the vertical screen into two useless, thing vertical strips---a configuration I have never seen any use case for. Even today now that there is some more configurability and you can vaguely put two apps in this configuration, there is still massive wasted space on the sides and the apps overlap.
