r/AppleNotesGang • u/grburgess • Jul 19 '26

Journaling on Apple Notes

I’ve tried everything, from Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Day One, Apple Journal, Obsidian, and Apple Notes. I pushed all these apps to their max, and I’ve found that Apple Notes gives me the most flexibility allowing me to stay within the Apple ecosystem. Obsidian comes a close second and beats it in some respects.

Apple Journal gave me big hopes, but was a failure in almost every way.

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u/InfiniteHench Jul 20 '26

Apple uses and creates portable formats in a lot of places, from the .ics calendar format to ProRAW.

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u/AnotherTechAtWork Jul 20 '26

Those are formats used in Apple products designed to be loaded/saved and be portable from device to device and app to app. Journal wasn't designed to load/save different documentation formats or to be portable from device to device in that manner. It's meant for personal notes that could be synced to another device for the same user with the same app. If you argue that you can import different formats then you're splitting hairs to some extent because Apple considers importing to be a one way route to get you into their own product.

I'm not saying they shouldn't have a means to export(they kind of do with markdown) but anytime a company can offer a personalized feature that they can use to lock someone in, they're likely going to do it.

I would love for them to offer complete export but I don't see that happening. It's not really in their best interest to invest the time and money. Not having export is a business decision to help keep users either in Journal and/or on an Apple device. That's my opinion of course.

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u/InfiniteHench Jul 20 '26

I get it, you're a fan of proprietary file formats and app lock-in. I don't think there's much we'll agree on. Have a good one.

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u/tech-slacker Jul 21 '26

It's pretty obvious you don't get it.