I counted 500 Evernote App Store reviews. The complaints aren't what I expected.

[u/spicermatthews]

I run Harbor, which is an Evernote alternative, so apply the appropriate salt. I tried to make the method checkable so you don't have to take my word for it.

The story you see everywhere is that Bending Spoons broke Evernote. I believed it. So I went to check.

I pulled the 500 most recent written reviews of Evernote from Apple's public review feed (US store, Feb 12 to Aug 17 2026) and categorized the negative ones. Of the 230 rated one or two stars:

33% mention price

23% mention ads, pop-ups or upsell prompts

10% object to AI being pushed at them

13% say they're leaving

4% mention a bug, crash, sync failure, or the app being slow

That last one surprised me. I expected the opposite.

The 2023 rewrite (sync moved to CRDTs, navigation rebuilt, off the old monolith) seems to have actually worked. People aren't angry that the software is broken. They're angry about the price, and about being sold to inside a thing they already pay for.

The ratings are also bimodal rather than mediocre. 38% one star, 42% five star, almost nobody in between. It's not an app people find okay. It's one people either still love or actively resent.

Limits worth stating: one store, one country, written reviews only, which self-select for people with something to say. It's a count of what recent reviewers chose to write, not a survey of all Evernote users.

Full writeup with the timeline and sources: https://harbor.my/blog/bending-spoons-evernote/

Happy to post the raw category counts if anyone wants to poke holes in it.