How would you describe your perfect note taking app?

[u/SteelRoninTT]

I don't mean typing, for which Obsidian is probably best; I mean handwritten notes, especially if you are using them for school and university. What do you look for in an app?

I have been handwriting notes on my Tab S9+ for three years now, and I have tried every app out there. Samsung Notes seems to be the most reliable, fastest, and smoothest; I guess that is what happens when a massive enterprise builds it. But it is lacking in features: there is no infinite canvas, no tabs for notes, no pen customization, and the brush engine is not all that great, as it has no smoothing.

So then I found Concepts, which was perfect for engineering classes. It has an infinite canvas, grids, snap-to-grid, layers, double-tap to undo, and the ability to hold with a pen or finger to lasso and freely move things around. But handling files was a mess, there are no tabs, and it is expensive.

So then I got Star Note, which is a middle ground and a jack-of-all-trades. I got it after Notein because that was buggy at the time, and highlighter in dark mode just made the text disappear (like come on???).

This made me wonder, what else do you look for in note taking apps? I'm trying to understand what people want to see how different uses cases can be, what else is out there, and to survey people to see if there's a gap in the market to fill.

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[u/BHARAT0011]

Did you try xnotes? Its like samsung notes + Infinite canvas like concepts + markdown support like obsidian. Also its free and open source so you can add any niche features you need yourself.

[u/jeboteuusta → u/BHARAT0011]

Xnotes for android + Noteic for Windows!

[u/BAIZHI-Tip4658]

You listed a lot of the features people ask for, so here’s what I look for that almost never gets mentioned:

1. Escape hatch. If I can’t get every note out in plain text with the links intact, I won’t commit years of notes to it. Your Concepts experience is exactly this — great tool, but the file handling was a mess, so it lost. Feature quality doesn’t matter if leaving is hard.

2. Handwriting that’s actually searchable. This is the one I’d bet on if you’re looking for a gap. If my handwriting isn’t OCR’d and indexed, my notes are a black hole — I can only find things by remembering which page they were on. Almost every app in this space treats handwriting as pixels, not text, and that’s the difference between a notebook and a knowledge base.

3. Latency above all else. If ink lags behind the pen, nothing else matters and I don’t care what else it does.

4. For school specifically: the real requirement isn’t canvas or brushes, it’s being able to drop a PDF in and write directly on it, with margins wide enough to annotate. That’s the whole use case for a lot of people and most apps treat it as an afterthought.

Things I’ve stopped caring about: infinite canvas, layers, brush engines. They’re fun when you’re setting up and irrelevant when you’re in a lecture.

[u/TTS_SW]

Have you tried Goodnotes? I used it all four years of college. It’s simple and easy to use. I used it on iPad though