5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use Apple Notes

Apple Notes, the default note-taking app every online Apple device comes with, may not be the best for you. While it’s a neatly designed application with strong pros, the cons could likely be a deal-breaker.

Here, we’ll explore why Apple Notes falls short of perfection and what the devs should implement in the future. So, perhaps if you were banking on one of these features in the future, it might save you some trouble to know that Apple Notes doesn’t have them—or doesn’t implement them properly.

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1. Limited Formatting and Customization

As a basic quick note-taking app that serves as something only for your eyes, Apple Notes offers a decent range of formatting and customization. However, once the purpose becomes even more nuanced, Notes falls apart, and you realize that it offers little compared to competitive alternatives.

For example, while you can change font colors, font size, font style, and other basic text formatting options, you can’t do more advanced things in Notes, such as custom line spacing and fonts. It also has limited heading styles, but that’s not all either.

The Notes app supports photos and videos but doesn’t allow you to change their size without doing some out-of-app maneuvering. You also don’t get to caption your images or add borders.

If your notes mainly involve working with pictures and more detailed layouts, you might be better off using a third-party app like Notion.

2. Only Accessible on Apple Devices

Technically, you can access Apple Notes without an Apple device if you have an Apple ID and a browser (using iCloud on the web). However, one of the founding uses of a note-taking app is quick access, which you lose by opening a browser, finding a URL, confirming, and logging in.

Apple has always been a bit selfish with what features it shares with non-Apple users—but if it can share Apple Music, then it can share Notes. However, Apple has chosen not to, making it almost impossible to continue your Apple Notes journey if you switch to an Android.

While you can sync the notes you create on an Apple device to Gmail (or any other supported account), you can’t edit the notes outside of an iCloud-enabled device. You also cannot access any non-iCloud notes from the browser version of Apple Notes. This means if you save a note to Google, you can’t edit it without an Apple device.

3. Limited Collaboration Features and No Version History

Apple Notes’ collaboration system is mediocre, especially when compared to competitors like Microsoft OneNote. While you can leave comments, assign different roles, and see edits in real-time on OneNote, Apple Notes has no comments, offers only “View” and “Edit” permissions, and doesn’t let you see where your collaborators are working on in real-time.

Apple Notes also doesn’t allow users to collaborate anonymously. Anybody trying to access the document must have an Apple ID, and they will have to use the limited web version of Apple Notes to access the document. If they don’t have an Apple ID, they must create one.

To top it all, there’s no way for collaborators to see the previous version history of whatever document they’re working on. This means that previous iterations of the document may be lost forever if they weren’t backed up—and it’s hard to tell what exactly may have changed since it was last edited.

4. Apple Notes Has No Template Option

If you were hoping to use Apple Notes to create different types of notes with templates quickly, then we’re sorry to inform you that it’s not possible. Apple Notes doesn’t support templates yet, and it’s unclear if it might get the feature down the line.

Some alternative note apps like Evernote have this feature, but custom templates are usually hidden behind a paywall.

5. No Markdown Support

Some users prefer to format their text using markdown since it keeps formatting and style stable across various platforms. If you’re one of these users, you shouldn’t stay away from Apple Notes. Instead, check out our list of the best Mac markdown editors to see if one of them works for you.

This is another feature that doesn’t seem likely to come to ever come to Apple Notes. Apple tends to target a more mainstream market when it comes to designing products like this, and it just doesn’t seem like something it will be interested in bringing to Notes.

Consider Using Better Alternatives to Apple Notes

There are so many alternatives to Apple Notes on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that there’s no need ever to be “stuck” with Apple Notes. While it may be great for personal note-taking and grocery lists, many other apps offer more robust features when your note-taking needs to go a notch higher.

If you need to collaborate or use Notes to compile documents for work or study, it might be time to research better apps to type your notes in.