Simplio Notepad vs Rune Secure Notes

A notepad that opens in one tap and then stays out of your way. If you have watched the notes app you used for years grow into a database with AI panels, sign-in screens and a sidebar of features you never asked for, Simplio Notepad is the calm alternative. It is a minimal notepad for jotting quick notes, drafting an email, capturing a meeting line or thinking out loud — no account to create, no cloud you cannot turn off, no friction between the thought and the page. Open the app and you are already in a fast text editor with the cursor blinking. Type, paste, or dictate. Markdown, simple lists and checkboxes are there when you need structure, pin and archive keep the important notes within reach, and search finds the half-remembered line in seconds. Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets surface today's note at a glance, so the scratchpad you started on the train is still one tap away when you sit down at the desk. Export any note as text or PDF when you need to hand it off to a document, an email or a colleague. The interface ships in 39 languages with full VoiceOver support, and the writing app stays deliberately quiet: no ads, no analytics, no engagement loops, no nudges trying to turn a notebook into a productivity system. A simple notepad for journalers, students, meeting note-takers and anyone who wants sticky notes, voice notes and markdown notes in one place that respects their time.

Rune is a calm, fast notes app for people who don't want to trust an app with their data. Your notes never leave your device, they are encrypted at rest, and the app makes no network connections at all. There is no account, no cloud, and no sign-up. Privacy by construction, not by promise: • No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, no tracking, none, not "anonymised", not "aggregated". • No networking code. Put your device in airplane mode and everything still works. If anything ever tries to reach the network, that is a bug. • No account and no server. There is no "we" that could hold your data. Real encryption: • Your passphrase derives a key with Argon2id; notes are sealed with XChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated encryption. Only ciphertext is ever written to disk. • The passphrase is never stored and is not recoverable. If you forget it, your notes are gone, no reset, no backdoor. That is the price of real privacy. • A wrong passphrase simply cannot decrypt your notes. • Optional Face ID / Touch ID unlock: opt in to unlock with biometrics. Even then the passphrase is never stored — only the in-memory key is cached behind the biometric prompt. What you can do: • Create, edit, search, and organise plain-text notes with a clean, calm layout. • Auto-lock on inactivity and lock-on-background; the app starts locked. • Export an encrypted backup (safe to keep anywhere); plaintext export is gated behind an explicit warning. • Capture voice notes and transcribe them to text entirely on your device with on-device speech recognition — no audio and no transcript ever leaves your phone. Free and open source under the GNU GPLv3. The security-critical code is a small, dependency-light core so it can be read and audited. Releases ship with cryptographic provenance and are built reproducibly, so you can verify the binary was built from this source.