Leave a Review Notability
If you value your sanity and data, try the other popular note taker
I work out of Notability about 40 hours per week. It freezes - a LOT. If you view in the iPhone app a note that you took in iPad, about 10% of the time it will completely wreck the formatting in the note, and the only way to recover is to restore from a previous version (if you’re using the version history feature). And a note about the version history feature - Notability deleted an entire semester worth of lecture recordings from my note, and completely erased all previous backups (a feature that up until that point was working just fine). The test is all there, just no lecture synced with it. And this happened 3 days before my final exam. I trusted Notability with my grade and it didn’t just let me down, it lit my car on fire and pushed it off a cliff.
This was the last straw. I’ve dealt with the many, many bugs (like crashing mid-lecture and then not allowing me to open my note again because it’s “syncing”) for well over a year at this point but I’ve had enough. No matter how many updates they release, there are major flaws that keep popping up. The app looks very polished and feature-rich so it gives the impression of quality, but I promise you that if you rely on the app more than just capturing the occasional 45 minute business meeting, you will regret it. There are other high quality note taking apps that include voice/text sync and are much more stable.Show lesswHyTeCoUnTrY
Developer Response
Hello, When able, can you please update to the newest versions of both the app and your device as this may help resolve the issue. If you are still encountering issues, can you please submit a support ticket by going through the steps described here: https://support.gingerlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/4414054941594-Contact-Support. We can take a look at your support/device diagnostics and dive deeper. Thanks!PUT ZOOM VIEW BACK ON THE PAGE PLEASE GOD
I’ve had this app for 6 years. I had to switch accounts a little over a year ago and now I have pay an additional 15 a year? Would be more accepting of the price increase if the app wasn’t getting objectively worse in the meantime. Thinking about switching to GoodNotes and if that doesn’t work I guess I’m going back to paper. This is borderline unusable. Most updates this app has undergone since I started using it have made it worse in one way or another but this last one is just kind of ridiculous. The new layout is awful, the interface is unrecognizable, the floating tool bar is a pain, all the useful features have been moved around or hidden to make way for a selection of significantly less relevant new ones. It all feels like change for the sake of change without real consideration for utility, and the app has been glitching constantly since. Genuinely pretty sad about it and really hoping at least a couple of the changes are reversed. Please don’t waste your money on it. And if anyone at corporate ever reads this- please, please, please take zoom view back out of settings. Or at least make adding it to the toolbar an option. It is such an unbelievable pain to have to go through multiple steps to get to it every time I want to write. Especially because you have to exit zoom to copy/paste, move things around, etc. It makes such a big difference to just have it out there on the screen.Show lessstopitplsidontubderstand
New Format Is Worse
I’ve used Notability since 2016, and while some of the smaller updates since then have been wonderful (like being able to add new colors, slight format changes, etc.), this totally new format is less easy to use. It’s not just about having to relearn a few things - that was expected - but the functionality is less intuitive and makes it more work to do simple things.
Before, I used to be able to easily press the little button on the bottom right corner for the zoom-in feature, now I have to go to the top right within a note to see settings, THEN press the zoom feature, every time? I know there’s another setting to be able to press and hold for it to come up, but it doesn’t work super well, and again -> less intuitive to figure out, especially for new users. Also, when zoomed in, it takes more work to change colors, utensils, undo, redo, etc. when the bar for those features is not automatically brought closer to the zoom-in section the way it used to be. I don’t understand why these updates were made when it makes every little thing take so much longer to write, draw, and edit by hand. The only thing that doesn’t take longer is typing, but there’s plenty of apps that can do that — the reason I chose to use Notability in the first place was to be able to hand write/draw over things quickly, which was working great…until this new format.Show lessicedcoffee33