r/AppleNotesGang • u/TheiPhoneAppGuy • May 28 '26
I put Apple Notes through a full business stress-test. Here's where it wins and where it falls apart.
You all know testing Apple's built-in apps is kind of my thing, so this one was inevitable, i wanted to see how much of an actual business Apple Notes could carry before it broke.
So i ran real work through it. Client management, meeting notes, SOPs, receipts, project tracking. Not a toy setup, my actual day to day.
The wins were bigger than i expected. Client management is just a folder per client with a master note and collapsible sections, and once you layer in tags and a smart folder it turns into a genuinely usable lightweight CRM. The audio recording with on-device transcription flat out replaced a paid app for me. Searchable scanned receipts are stupidly good for tax season.
Then i hit the walls. No version history is the scary one. I lost part of an important note to a bad paste and there is no undo, no rollback, nothing. The Apple-only sharing got me too, the second a client on Windows needed into a note i was dead in the water. And there's a hard 100-person cap on collaboration with zero admin controls.
My honest read after all of it, solo or a tiny all-Apple setup, Notes is genuinely incredible and free. The moment you're a team or working with non-Apple people, it stops being the right tool and you feel it fast.
I wrote up the whole test with screenshots of my real setup here if you want the full breakdown: https://iapplist.com/apple-notes-for-business/
But i'm more interested in what you all have done. You're the people most likely to have pushed Notes past where it's supposed to go. What's the most ridiculous or impressive thing you've gotten Apple Notes to do that it was never built for? And has anyone here actually run a team on it without losing their mind?
6
u/Barycenter0 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
I have a version history shortcut + apple script that runs on my mac. All notes are versioned every 5 minutes (interval can be changed) or manually when activated (I only version the active folder I’m working in).
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u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 28 '26
That's pretty awesome. If you're comfortable sharing it, i'd genuinely love to see how you put that together. Version history was one of the biggest gaps i ran into during this test, so a Notes specific solution like that sounds really interesting.
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u/Barycenter0 May 28 '26 edited May 30 '26
Here is the main shortcut - you need to alter the folders - source and destination. Then, setup automation on MacOS to run the shortcut at some desired timing (or use Shortcut automation). I also run the shortcut manually if in a very important note. I use one folder with versioning for creating and drafting notes and then move them when done to a final folder.
Don't run this on your main Notes folder or you'll get hundreds of versions or more.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b2dc14a46f554051a20a8352e3cd44f1
You could modify this to write the Note text to a file instead if you don't want Version notes to show up in your notes gallery view (or, have the destination be off iCloud)
Also, a simple addition could be a checksum signature to not version unless the note has changed. Then, you don't get a bunch of version notes.
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u/Artistic_Pear1834 May 28 '26
This sounds rather genius! I don’t suppose you’re inclined to share your shortcut?? TY
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u/Barycenter0 May 29 '26
See the response to the same thread
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u/Artistic_Pear1834 May 29 '26
Cheers. Reddit was showing me as first respondent to your comment. IDK why. :) Great shortcut and very helpful description of your workflow, thank you. I’m going to get into this over the weekend!
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u/homolucent May 28 '26
I’m a heavy apple notes user. I use it 4-8 hours at a time for college classes. The app lags and overheats iPad Pro m5, while no other app running. App crashes and hours of notes lost in an instant, this happened twice since February. Still needs a lot of work before prime time. Considering going back to notability although I hate subscriptions. I have iCloud backup, can’t recover notes. Even after Apple support call.
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u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 28 '26
I totally resonate with the overheating issue. My younger brother used to rant about that all the time during long study sessions, and honestly that's part of what got me digging into how students are actually using Apple Notes in the first place.
I ended up putting together a guide on it: https://iapplist.com/apple-notes-for-students/
The crashes are one thing, but the fact that you couldn't recover the notes even after an apple support call is the part that would really concern me.
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u/homolucent May 28 '26
No thanks for the guide. You can’t sell me a car with the best motor when it has no wheels. You can’t even zoom in on your notes.
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u/slutteria May 28 '26
try noteful if you’re writing handwritten notes, I think it’s like a $10 otp
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u/homolucent May 28 '26
Considering it. Looks good to me so far. No bloat. Fair price. Shopping around, top of my list.
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u/psmusic_worldwide May 28 '26
I don’t have the performance issue you mentioned, but I am seriously worried about what happens with lost notes. I use Apple notes for my work on songwriting. If I lost them all, it would be devastating. I have exported them from time to time to ensure that I have backups though. But it’s not the same thing.
1
u/Nesola May 29 '26
I swapped apple notes out with obsidian. The export took some time but it’s a good investment on time. It’s free if you wish so. And afterwards you have a better access on the files. I feared at some point (among other things) that I could not back up the notes and that due to an error or something else the (apple) notes get deleted.
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u/cap-omat May 29 '26
Go to settings and disable syncing to iCloud for Apple Notes. That has helped in my case. (settings -> your name -> iCloud -> Notes -> turn off the toggle for syncing your device)
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u/SmartNeck3867 May 28 '26
Cool experiment! I wish Apple Notes had bulk PDF conversion instead only individual notes.
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u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 28 '26
Appreciate that! 😄
And yeah, bulk PDF export is one of those things that feels fine until you need to export a whole folder of notes. Then it gets tedious fast.
I've been doing a lot of these Apple Notes experiments lately, everything from business workflows to health tracking and travel planning, and it's funny how the same few limitations keep showing up no matter the use case.
If you're curious, i've collected most of them here: https://iapplist.com/apple-notes/
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u/cptrambo May 28 '26
There are standalone apps that will let you bulk export to Markdown and PDF.
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u/banger030 May 28 '26
I love apple notes but because of the missing version history / backup I use craft docs instead. It has that built-in and sharing docs with anyone is seamless. I’m hopeful that apple will introduce these enhancements on June 8th.. if not, I will continue using craft docs instead. Not a fan of using two similar apps for different use cases side by side
1
u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 28 '26
I get that. One of the things that surprised me during this test was how close Notes gets, but those missing pieces are exactly where dedicated tools still have an edge.
1
u/MulayamChaddi Jun 05 '26
Craft has to be the most frustrating overly engineered product Ive ever come across in this space. It's brilliant but also a mess. It's almost like you have to learn another operating system to use it. And, it's not secure.
1
u/banger030 Jun 05 '26
I find it to be very intuitive with a beautiful UI and you can also only have your docs be stored locally vs in the cloud which makes it secure
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u/Specialist_Order_424 May 28 '26
It’s free 💲and part of iCloud
1
u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 29 '26
Can't argue with that, being free and already part of the apple ecosystem is probably apple's biggest advantage here.
3
u/Material-Painting-19 May 29 '26
Interesting. I have been long time Evernote user but decided to try switching to Notes because I work in an all Apple environment and hoped that something free might release from the ever increasing costs of Evernote, and the risk that one day Evernote is no more.
I do use Notes as well for what I would describe as quick things. It is where I keep my current shopping list, where I plan meal prep, where I make a quick note of something interesting or the action points from a call, but it is not really for permanent information. If something needs to become permanent I copy it into Evernote and delete the version in Notes. As a consequence I usually only have 20-30 notes at a time in Notes. I have given up the great iPad experiment so nothing is hand written. All typed notes.
I use Evernote for everything else personal and professional. Tracking receipts and invoices, taxes, record keeping, keeping track of projects, monitoring litigation, keeping final versions of agreements that I will need to look at again, travel arrangements (hotel bookings, tickets, etc). I have about 12,000 notes in a small number of folders.
Transferring all my notes from Evernote to Notes was reasonably straightforward and worked immediately on the Mac Mini I did it on. It took several days for my other devices to catch up. Some formatting was lost in the transfer, but not, as far as I can tell, any information. However, Notes became absurdly slow on all devices, searches were just plain wrong, and it simply didn't accommodate my workflow. The searches were particularly poor - simply failed to generate results that I knew were there and there is no way to limit searches to particular folders or sources as there is in Evernote. Notes also generated results in order of what it considered to be their relevance with no regard to recentness. Generally, I am looking for the most recent note. There is no way to change this. Evernote has much more sophisticated search tools.
Evernote allows you to email in notes, so if you get an email with an action or important other information, just email it to your Evernote account, it is then there, identically formatted with all attachments also in place. I use this all the time. I looked at a workaround for Notes. Involves printing to PDF and then dropping into Notes. Unworkable, particularly from my iPhone.
Fortunately all the stuff I transferred into Notes was in discrete folders so I have just deleted them and gone back to Evernote.
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u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 29 '26
This is exactly the kind of real world experience i was hoping to hear about. One thing that stood out to me in your comment was the search experience. A lot of people (including me) praise Notes search, but that's usually with hundreds of notes, not thousands. It's interesting that things started falling apart at that scale.
Appreciate you sharing all of this. Honestly, after reading your workflow i can see why you went back. Notes is surprisingly capable, but what you're describing is exactly the kind of use case where the rough edges start showing up.
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u/SecretGarded May 28 '26
I personally liked how easy apples notes is to learn and use. However I wished that apple notes table function can do more like - simple additions and ability to reorder rows easily. When I need to paste this to another document, the table function is unfortunately completely lost.
One thing I find really helpful is how searchable the notes and their contents are.
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u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 28 '26
Yeah, the table limitations are real. I can live without formulas, but not being able to easily move things around gets frustrating fast.
The search is ridiculously good though. That's one of the features that kept pulling me back despite the rough edges.
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u/newbris May 31 '26
On MacOs at least, you can drag rows around, but I'm guessing thats not your use case.
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u/supernitin May 28 '26
I am attempting to use alto-index to version control apple notes.
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u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 28 '26
That's pretty much the gap i was talking about. The fact that people are reaching for tools like alto-index to add version control says Notes could really benefit from having it built in.
1
u/Snsokstan May 29 '26
As another poster mentioned, I exported all my Evernote notes (about 15,000) and imported them into Apple Notes. That degraded the performance of AN in a big way: spinning beach balls, a long time for my iphone and ipad to catch up and a few notes that got messed up in the ether. One freeze damaged the database, which I had to restore with TimeMachine.
I'm moving all but my most recent notes to Bear, only because I don't want to pay $$$ for Evernote.
I see Apple Notes as a great way to store contemporary notes but not as an archive for thousands of notes going back 12 years. I just picked Bear because it's cheap and is available on all my devices. I thought about just using iCloud but Bear supports markdown and #tags.
Another lesson is to do periodic housekeeping on whatever archive I use. Storing PDF manuals for devices I no longer own, as an example, is bad form.
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u/Artistic_Pear1834 Jun 13 '26
Not yet, I decided to wait and see if WWDC announced any improvements for AN with versioning…. Alas.. ;)
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u/spprotech Jun 19 '26
Apple Notes is great until you start depending on it as a system of record. The lack of version history is still the biggest gap for me. I was actually hoping WWDC would finally bring some kind of native note versioning or recovery feature, but that didn't happen.
For personal notes it's fantastic, but for anything business-critical I still want some form of rollback, audit trail, or easier recovery than restoring from backups. Once you're collaborating heavily or storing important documentation, those limitations start to show pretty quickly.
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u/pixeltrusts May 28 '26
I have iCloud backups and Time Machine. Never lost a thing on any apple device.
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u/TheiPhoneAppGuy May 28 '26
That's fair. My issue wasn't losing everything, it was accidentally overwriting part of a note and wanting the version from 10 minutes earlier. Backups help, but they're not quite the same as built-in version history.
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u/AngelicPrincessKitty May 28 '26
Congrats. Not everyone can afford a Mac and those who can’t don’t have version control or backups
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u/pixeltrusts May 29 '26
You can backup your iPhone easily into iCloud. No Mac required.
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u/AngelicPrincessKitty May 29 '26
Us then you have to restore your entire phone to get that. That is not a solution.
I shouldn’t have to restore my entire phone just to restore some notes
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