My Notes: A Markdown App for Android

In November 2019 I wrote my own notes app for Android, used it daily for a while, and then it lost a long battle with Obsidian. The loss was the lesson: I learned what I actually wanted from a notes app by watching mine fail to be it. Years later that same itch is why I wrote reconcile-text; by then I was editing the same notes in Vim, VS Code, and Obsidian, and nothing existed to merge three independently-edited copies back into one.

The app itself was small: Markdown notes, hashtag filtering, Markwon for rendering. Every developer writes their own notes app eventually and the bar for shipping one isn’t high. What I actually wanted was a few weeks outside the web stack, somewhere with different conventions about lifecycle, storage, and resource constraints. Android delivered that. I’d still recommend “write a small thing on a new platform” as a way to recalibrate what you take for granted.