From Quip to Apple Notes

I’m really into journaling. I have hundreds of them. Home journals, health journals, personal journals, finance journals, family journals, food journals. I have a journal for every car I’ve owned. Every project I work on gets multiple journals. I find it so useful to be able to quickly search through these and fill in the details that get lost over time.

Since my Airbnb days, I’ve used Quip for not only journaling but almost all my note-taking. As an Evernote user, discovering Quip was like getting a cold glass of water in hell. As a note-taking app, for me at least, it just got every detail right. It was opinionated about styling and formatting but in all the right ways. Cmd-J brought up a search field that searched through all notes instantly. And it was free to boot.

I knew the writing was on the wall when in 2016 Salesforce bought Quip for $750 million. (How a note-taking app could be worth that kind of money remains a total mystery to me.) But it kept working so I kept using it. And slowly it enshittified. It got slower, it started signing me out at random times, and undo became unreliable.

Now I guess they’re finally putting it out of its misery: I got the email that Quip is shutting down after March 2027.

What am I going to use instead? Google Docs? Obsidian? Pages? Apple Notes?

My daughter loves Obsidian so I thought I’d try that first. Since I have over a thousand documents in Quip, I wrote a little script to convert everything to markdown, then imported them into Obsidian. But what I didn’t realize is that while Obsidian is free, you have to pay for Obsidian Sync to work collaboratively, so that became a deal breaker.

Next I looked at Google Docs. Free? Check. Collaboration? Check. Native apps? Nope. Deal breaker. Next.

Apple has put a lot of work into the collaboration features of Pages, and (after another migration script…) it was able to import most of my Quip documents. I really thought Pages was going to be the answer and I stuck with it for a while, but the reality is that Pages just isn’t a note-taking app, it’s a page layout app. And for me that meant constantly dealing with fiddly style formatting UI. After a few weeks of frustration, I gave up.

I finally landed on Apple Notes and I’m pretty happy with it. It handles 1,000+ notes impressively and the performance hardly seems to suffer. Collaboration is great. I created a “Family Shared” folder with all of our shared notes and that works perfectly. Honestly, at this point the thing I miss the most is being able to easily add dates (in Quip this was as simple as typing @date), but I solved that with a Keyboard Maestro macro.

Long live Apple Notes!