Great study tool, but needs fixing
I love this app for content heavy lectures and studying. I have the Pro version, but the AI “explain this” feature only works 50% of the time. It will say “something went wrong.” That is one of the most helpful features for me when studying for a test so it’s frustrating that they haven’t fixed the issue. Other than that the app works great and has been super helpful. Would love for them to add other AI study tools aside from flashcards and test questions like a mind map feature and allowing you to organize and highlight note summaries to create study guides.
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Great App Plagued by Untapped Potential and Poor Framework
Notability is a fantastic note taking software that is worth the optional buy-in for additional functionality. As a student who has used the app almost daily for 4 years, it is hard to imagine getting through college without it. Major features I like - you can import pdfs, images, and more into a note, and adjust your template in the same note. You can record audio that links to your writing strokes and navigate to where transcribed audio matches your notes. Depending on your tablet model, you can enable quick gestures/features that drastically speed up note taking, like double or triple taps to undo and redo strokes. You can also use Apple Pencil tapping gestures to swap tools if you have the right models. You can export pdfs and other file types, adjusting page count and more. Now, with all of that being said, as someone who has subscribed for years, this app has many issues that, frankly, have gone unaddressed by the Notability development team for too long. First and foremost, the biggest issue with this app is how it stores and loads your notes. If you have too little storage, or a bad iCloud sync occurs, your notes will be completely inaccessible. This has happened several times, and is well documented by other Notability users. Other small bugs have also persisted, like bad shape recognition for auto-drawing, poor UI such as file names at the top of notes being covered by drawing tools, and more. Furthermore, for every good feature there is with this app, there is a glaring gap of another. A primary example is there is no infinite canvas in the app. Still. Other lacking features like better file management/hierarchy are also frustrating (devs-give us sub-folders!), this includes the inability to name two notes the same, regardless of whether they exist in separate folders. Missing basic functionalities like these are frustrating when the dev-team appears more focused on improving AI note analysis. This brings me to my final issue with the app - only offering a subscription pricing model for a service that hasn’t fixed minor bugs, hasn’t offered greater note taking functionality, and poorly stores your files externally feels criminal. All-in-all, this is a great app that, unfortunately, has IMMENSE untapped potential, and a dev-team preoccupied with the wrong things. Do I recommend it? Yes. Do I find it frustrating and feel abandoned by the devs? Also yes.
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Resume
V
Login issue
It forces me to login once a while, which is really annoying. Sometimes it freezes during the login and I cannot access my notes.
Unsubscribing
I’ve been a paid subscriber for years. I’m no longer paying for this app. I had yearsssssss of organized written content in my app. They did a mass logout of all accounts and I could not log back in. Their customer support is atrocious. It is only AI slop support with no care or helpful responses. It was only me following up, asking for more help. Nothing. I never got to log back in. Never again will I give another penny to this thoughtless, selfish app
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What Happened?..
I have been using notability for years. I used it to save and organize recipes, and household projects and it all disappeared. I opened the app today and I got a Welcome page and invite to start the tutorial for new users.
Best purchase I’ve made
I am an online tutor and a student. This app really is easy to use! Valid!
App works but customer support is unhelpful
App is great for taking notes, as long as you don’t encounter any bugs. If you do, expect the developers to take their sweet time getting it fixed. All the bugs I encountered and reported eventually got fixed. Customer support is not very helpful.
Bug with locked notes!
Still a bug that you can see locked notes in recents while you are putting in the password
Frozen App can’t access notes
I have updated, quit the app, and restarted my iPad and I cannot open ANY of my 100s of notes. It just stays frozen in the homepage and I can’t scroll or click on anything.
Best on the market, but buggy
This is definitely the best note taking app for students, but despite that it’s still really buggy. I am spending a lot of money on the app and it has tons of little bugs that really add up. When you try to contact support, an AI bot responds to your email. The AI is horrible - it can’t differentiate between the current email and the message history, and it keeps telling me that it’ll connect me with a human if I submit a ticket through the app… which is what I did initially!
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It’s okay
This app is fine for taking notes. I purchased the premium version because I wanted to take advantage of the quizzes, tests, matching game, etc. However, if I have a 10 page note, it’ll only ask me questions from 3 of those pages. And it’s 80 questions! It even does the same thing if I have less pages, like 5 pages. Then it’ll only ask information from 1 or 2 pages. It never asks all or even half the information. I don’t think anyone should pay for this app until they adjust this. 10 questions based on a couple sentences is ridiculous. Just use this as a free note taking app to save paper. It was infinitely better spring semester 2026, idk why they butchered it for the paying customers. It also doesn’t update the quiz/test section if you do one of them and then add more to your notes after. You have to duplicate the note so it updates the quiz/test questions.
For the testing section: the fill in the blank portions are extremely confusing. A question is never asked, only a statement is made, and it looks like it should be true or false. This would be an example of something it asks: “There are different types of animals; cats are felines.” I would feel inclined to put true, but the answer would be something like mammal. And when I manage to guess what it’s asking of me, my answer is right, but either too specific or not specific enough or I put the acronym version. I wish there was a way to mark my answer as correct after being graded, so that it knows for next time that the answer I put is acceptable.
For the testing section: the fill in the blank portions are extremely confusing. A question is never asked, only a statement is made, and it looks like it should be true or false. This would be an example of something it asks: “There are different types of animals; cats are felines.” I would feel inclined to put true, but the answer would be something like mammal. And when I manage to guess what it’s asking of me, my answer is right, but either too specific or not specific enough or I put the acronym version. I wish there was a way to mark my answer as correct after being graded, so that it knows for next time that the answer I put is acceptable.
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Hard to use offline
App will offload files as storage on device gets low. Then you either cannot access offline or it takes forever to download the documents back that you want.
Okay app… cannot handle large PDFs without being a battery hog, but the simple UI is nice
So I was about to stop using this app but it looks like it cannot handle huge PDFs without draining the battery. So if you have to annotate huge PDFs use a different app. But other than this, the UI is simple which I like. And I appreciate that they don’t change it every month like SOME other apps do (Goodnotes).
I would really like a scribble to erase feature that gives us the option to scribble with the pen over a portion of text to erase it. So many other apps at least give the option to do this, yet Notability STILL doesn’t. What also greatly annoys me is the lack of Apple Pencil hover support. This should be on notability by now (at least give us the option). And the squeeze to erase feature is beyond stupid to me. I already have the option to double tap my pencil to erase. Why do I need to have the same redundant option (that ergonomically makes zero sense) to simultaneously squeeze AND HOLD the Apple Pencil to erase? At least give us the option to squeeze for the tool palette like EVERY OTHER NOTES APP.
Needless to say, the lack of these features are embarrassing for an app that you have to pay a subscription for. What note takers want is 1) app reliability (include cloud note storage) 2) consistency and simplicity and 3) tools and functions that make our workflow easier.
More AI bloat gives us none of those things.
At the end, I will happily pay a subscription (within reasonable competitive pricing) if those 3 demands are met. I want features that make my like easier, and the AI stuff is great sure. But it’s time to pivot to reliability and consistency. If Notability meets these things, I will be very pleased.
I would really like a scribble to erase feature that gives us the option to scribble with the pen over a portion of text to erase it. So many other apps at least give the option to do this, yet Notability STILL doesn’t. What also greatly annoys me is the lack of Apple Pencil hover support. This should be on notability by now (at least give us the option). And the squeeze to erase feature is beyond stupid to me. I already have the option to double tap my pencil to erase. Why do I need to have the same redundant option (that ergonomically makes zero sense) to simultaneously squeeze AND HOLD the Apple Pencil to erase? At least give us the option to squeeze for the tool palette like EVERY OTHER NOTES APP.
Needless to say, the lack of these features are embarrassing for an app that you have to pay a subscription for. What note takers want is 1) app reliability (include cloud note storage) 2) consistency and simplicity and 3) tools and functions that make our workflow easier.
More AI bloat gives us none of those things.
At the end, I will happily pay a subscription (within reasonable competitive pricing) if those 3 demands are met. I want features that make my like easier, and the AI stuff is great sure. But it’s time to pivot to reliability and consistency. If Notability meets these things, I will be very pleased.
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Used to be better and disappointing
It was between this and goodnotes & i decided to purchase this over goodnotes expecting to have the transcribe with smart note feature that sets it apart from good notes to be free considering Ive already paid and thats the luring point of the app that differentiates it from others. But no , they want you to pay for pro for that, which then i don’t see is the point even purchasing the app. Therefore its just another note taking app that u can realistically get for free. Super disappointing and unreliable.
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was good until AI
used to be a great app until they added all this AI stuff
Waste
I left a review and got emailed to reach out to them. I did and got a message from an AI bot to repeat the same steps… don’t waste your time. There is always issues and it’s very inconsistent across platforms. I have also seen notes disappear which apparently has been an issue for years with them. Wasted money but I’m just going to go back to goodnotes.
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Mac version is rough
UPDATE: Customer service was zero help. They had a bot tell me the equivalent of “try turning it off and back on” and eventually connected me with a person who also gave generic, unhelpful (and inapplicable) advice and labeled the issue as resolved, leaving me unable to respond to it without opening a new ticket. Love Notability, but the Mac version crashes multiple times a day. I have to force quit it practically every use, whereas it is fine on iPad and iPhone. On a side not, the IOS version should support focus mode and a better way to search!
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Quality has went downhill over the past 4 years
Notability used to be my go to app for note taking on my iPad, but since the start of this semester, I’ve noticed it takes FOREVER to load notes. Each time I open the app, it’s like the app undownloaded all of my notes, and spends 5-6 minutes trying to fetch it from ICloud (even if no changes are made). I normally download my class’s lectures before class to save time, because our professors tend to jump right in, but the new buffering time makes it so that I have to wait 5-10 minutes of class to start my notes. I have adequate storage 86/200 GB, and the app keeps informing me I need to have more storage (when that is obv not the case). I’ve done everything to make the app smoother but I’ve had no luck. I used to love this app, and paid premium (now I pay lite, to get me through this last semester in college), but if I’d known this app would go downhill like this, I wouldn’t have picked it to write all my notes (user since Freshman year of highschool, now a senior in college).
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Disappointing
Why has folder syncing across devices stopped? I have followed all the suggested solutions but bidirectional syncing is not happening anymore. Is this a ploy to make me subscribe?
