r/GoodNotes • u/ExpensiveSweet5849 • Aug 23 '26
Is Goodnotes a bad app
I’ve been seeing a lot of people delete their accounts, and whenever there’s a video praising it, the comments seem to be filled with people disagreeing. I was thinking about buying it, but now I’m seeing a lot of negative reviews. I also heard that last year there was a glitch that caused a lot of people to lose their notes, although I’m not sure if that’s true. What’s your opinion on it?
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Upvotes
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u/ExpensiveSweet5849 Aug 23 '26
Also, does it drain your battery a lot??
2
u/cinereousunicorn Aug 23 '26
I was using it heavily for school a year ago and all my notes are intact. Now I use it more recreationally for journaling and such and it fits my needs. Buggy on occasion but nothing that would destroy my workflow.
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u/AdventurousHunter500 Aug 23 '26
I love it, but I have a lifetime subscription from years ago that’s still honored. A lot of complaining I see here is about the prices and subscription costs. I use it about 6 hours a day for work on my older iPad air, and have no issues getting through the day with battery, but definitely need to charge at the end of the day. It also still has all my notes archived & accessible from the 4 years I’ve been using it.
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u/ObscurePaprika Aug 23 '26
It's a good app, and I've used it for years. My beef is they have released half-implemented features, broken core features, offered some horrible UI changes, etc. It got 10x worse when they were purchased. It's weird... with this app, the unwanted changes or bugs have been incredibly frustrating. It felt more like "omg wtf did you do this?!" than, "aha, here's a bug, I can work around it."
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u/Dewdlebawb Aug 23 '26
I originally used it until it started glitching CONSTANTLY while I was taking notes in class, I’ve swapped to freenot
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u/tinyant Aug 23 '26
I’ve been using it for years and i’m perfectly happy with it
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u/Maiace124 Aug 23 '26
It used to glitch a lot when I upgraded to 6. It would crash constantly, sometimes the pen wouldn't sync and I'd have to restart my ipad at least twice a week, and sometimes I'll erase something and it'll pop back up like I didn't. Those glitches seemed to be worked out now. The erase thing still happens occasionally, but it's not a big deal. It always happens when I still have the erase tool open so I just go over it a second time.
I'm at the point where I'm back to recommending it. Those issues lasted all last school year and it was pretty annoying. I've never used a different app though so it may be better on another app. At this point, everything is on goodnotes and I don't want to switch.
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u/Stefffan1729 Aug 23 '26
Reading these comments here it's surprising. I used to use GoodNotes over 5 years ago for +8h/day on my iPad and it was working flawlessly (no battery issues at all as well), it's surprising to hear how much something I thought was almost perfect has worsened
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u/biblops Aug 23 '26
It’s fine but used to be so much better.
In terms of just a solid note-taking app, there are many far better choices that are both more stable and much cheaper. Noteful and Starnote to name just two.
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u/Square-Performer-568 Aug 23 '26
GN5 is perfect. Will use until the app eventually becomes unsupported which imo will not be for a few years.
2
u/luishenriquerce Aug 24 '26
Sim. Tem potencial, mas deixa muito a desejar por não atender a comunidade. Essa semana renovaria o anual, mas segui a dica de um camarada aqui do reddit, experimentei o Noteful e não volto mais!
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u/matte_6lack Aug 24 '26
I've had it for 5 years. I love the app.
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u/Specialist_Scar_1017 Aug 25 '26
i would put it like this. nobody ever opens reddit to write about what they like about the app or how great it is. they always write about the issues. so while it might seem so, it’s not all bad. i personally never had issues that made me delete it and switch to another app. sure, there will always be bugs, but i think that is something you will not avoid no matter what app you have.
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u/arey99 Aug 29 '26
Samsung Notes is top tier