Notes 4+

As much as I love this app, and I’ve been using it many, many years, my issue is being able to lock the app itself. I know you can lock individual notes but I have SO many that to do that individually would be way too much. I have thousands and thousands of separate notes. If we could lock the app altogether, would be fantastic! Please consider it. This is the only app I trust not to be discontinued. I’ve had a few that I bought and when I got a new phone, the content was not available or it was discontinued or whatever… I was devastated as I need to be able to go back and check stuff. I copied all my entries from the other apps to this one and that’s when I realized I cannot lock the app itself. I try others on occasion for locking purposes but I always end up here again. Ty for keeping it around. It’s reliable! That’s important to me. Although so is my privacy….locking the app would help so much! This app is my lists and journal and thought keeper … everything. I use it multiple times daily.

I pay for iCloud+ and I am full in the Apple ecosystem owning an iPhone 13 Pro Max, M1 iPad Pro, M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14”, and more hoping for a seamless and flawless experience. However, that has not been the case with the Apple Notes app which I rely heavily on in college to take handwritten notes with the Apple Pencil on PDFs. First, my biggest gripe is the iCloud Sync issues where hours of progress are not saved. Second, for some reason, when using the Apple Pencil, my M1 iPad Pro gets extremely hot and the battery life drains like crazy. Third, the app frequently crashes for no reason at all. You would think an app made by Apple would be better than this, but it is not. I have researched online and many other people have these frustrating issues with no solution to give. There are countless posts to Apple Support, but they do not help at all. I have even submitted several reports on the Feedback app as I have a developer account, but none of my concerns have been addressed. I understand that alternatives like Goodnotes and Notability exist, but I hold a strong opinion against subscription services unless they are absolutely necessary. Please Apple, fix these issues. I KNOW you know they exist. You have the most intelligent software engineers in the world so this should be a piece of cake to solve. Many loyal customers including myself have been getting increasingly frustrated. This is simply unacceptable from one of the largest tech companies on the planet.

The problem with this app is that it is designed in a way that makes it almost inevitable that you will delete information. Recently while editing a note, I realized that I had recorded some data in the wrong note. I highlight the text so that I could cut or delete it but that option was not available. Among others I had the option of copying it but no simple delete was offered. So I had to manually starting from the end of the sentence hold down the backspace until the data was removed totally. But that is because it takes too long to hit it repeatedly and it proceeds much more quickly to hold it down. So it starts with one letter at a time and does this for several letters, then will delete words one at a time, but then very quickly if you continue holding it down it will delete your entire note. This all takes place within a span of a couple or three seconds. There is no time to react to it. Once the note is gone, there is no means to recover. I am told shaking the phone will undo your most recent action. But why not just place an option on the screen to undo? There is no security to protect the notes using save in which case changes could be discarded if you are not satisfied with them, or can continue in a state of edit. In short, not a single thing which could be done to protect your data is done to protect it. This app is among the very worst.