Obsidian for Mobile — Your plain-text second brain on the go, for iOS and Android

Congratulations on the launch ?makers. Funny story of how I actually discovered your product before. I learnt about obsidian and thought it'd be a kick-ass name for an idea I was building. Headed over to Namecheckr to find you had bagged it. I'm glad though since you seem to be doing a great job. All the best! (and again, great name!)

Hi Product Hunt! 👋 Maker of Obsidian here. Obsidian is a personal knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. You can find our previous launch here. It's been a little over a year since we launched Obsidian, and we're finally releasing the mobile apps! TL;DR: Originally set out to build a lite mobile app, but we gladly changed our minds to build a full-featured mobile app that supports community plugins, graph view, panes, and sidebars. Basically all the things you love about Obsidian desktop app. Longer version: The mobile app has been in the making for more than 4 months. Why did it take so long? Originally, we wanted to make a lightweight mobile app that acts as a companion of the desktop app. It lets you view your notes and do some quick capturing on the go, and that's about it. However, our users have made sure to let us know that they don't want a half-assed mobile app. If it can only view and capture notes, how is it any better than the existing Markdown editor apps? Luckily, we were eventually convinced. And this begins our constant iterations to bring almost all desktop features to much smaller screens. Just counted—we did 15 mobile private beta releases over the 4 months, and that's not including the countless internal iterations we did with our moderator team. This is in addition to the regular updates and fixes to the desktop app, thus the delay. But the wait is over! The mobile app now supports: - Customizable toolbar - Pull down Quick Action - Graph view - Community plugins - Themes - Sidebar pinning for tablet - iCloud vaults (on iOS) - Share to Obsidian (on Android, coming to iOS soon) - Pick any folder as vault (on Android) We want to take the chance to thank our Catalyst members to test the app during the private beta and to provide financial support that helps make Obsidian sustainable. Special thanks to Nezlok from Ubisoft for supporting our mobile app project! Lastly, thanks to our vibrant community for using Obsidian and supporting us! If you're interested, you can join our Discord chatroom and forum here: https://obsidian.md/community

Love your idea to release app with more features based on customer's feedback. Good luck with the launch!

Just 99% perfect. I absolutely love your work. That final 1% would be storing Vaults in Dropbox on iOS for me. Cheers for all your great efforts.

I absolutely love using obsidian on the desktop, it has the perfect combination of everything I'd want in a knowledge base and it's always fun to see the second brain grow and form links in the graphs, so I'm glad to see that the graph is on the mobile version as well! Great to see it finally coming to mobiles, can't wait to try it out. Congrats on the launch!

Been using Obsidian Mobile for a few months now and it's wonderful. An experience that closely mirrors the desktop with support for the majority of desktop plugins, full theming capability and customizations, the works. Runs beautifully on both tablets and phone. As always, the development team is wildly responsive and cranking out feature updates with ungodly regularity. At the same time, the broader Obsidian community is producing plugins at a fantastic pace, meeting various user needs, both obscure and broadly-desired. Best of all, everyone is wonderful, open and supportive of each other — power users and newbies alike. It's a product you love using, a community you're happy to be associated to and is supportive of one another, and a service that you can feel confident in over the long haul, with security and data ownership being a primary concern. I cannot praise Obsidian enough. My hats off to @_ericaxu and @shida_li and everyone involved. Lots to be proud of here.

I have been waiting so long for this! So happy to see it's finally out for mobile! :D Since I usually talk a lot about different apps on my social media, do you guys have some affiliate network or similar?

Obsidian is amazing. Enough said. It being widely available on mobile is just another big win. Best of luck and congrats!

Thank you! 👏 I have been using Obsidian on Desktop for a while, to capture and organize my thoughts and notes. Great stuff!

I've been using Obsidian every single day for over a year now, and all I can say is that it's incredible. The rate of development by @shida_li and @erica_xu is nothing short of amazing, as is the sense of community and support across the available channels (Discord and their community forum being the main ones). And I haven't even mentioned the lively plugin developer community that sprung to life after introducing the API (Todoist integration anyone?). While the apps themselves may not be open source, one of the main differentiators for me initially was that Obsidian allows you to maintain a local database of .md files, meaning there's interoperability with other Markdown apps as well as no vendor lock-in. (Plus, it means you can choose not to store your data in the cloud/pay for a monthly subscription). I've tested most if not all of the personal knowledge base/wiki, second brain, networked thought, relational/knowledge graph type apps out there (and continue to do so) - and end up migrating my test data into Obsidian every single time. Both beautiful and elegant, it's one of the few tools out there that allow you to adopt new behaviors successfully and, as a result of that, become more productive (and dare I say creative). The launch of Obsidian Sync (syncing between devices, end-to-end encryption, version history) and Obsidian Publish (selective publishing with graph view and outlines) opened up a large number of additional use-cases for many... and now there's a solid mobile app. Kudos and congrats to the dev team. If you haven't already, visit the Obsidian website, get the app(s) you need- donate and subscribe if you can - and don't look back. It might be the best decision you make all year.

Congrats on the launch! I didn't know about Obsidian before, it makes me want to give it a try on mobile to see how much of my numerous daily thoughts I can organize in notes

Looking forward to giving this a try! I've been enjoying Roam Research, which looks to be similar in a lot of respects, but the mobile experience is very lacking. This may be exactly what I need.

Downloaded Obsidian on the iPhone and I'm trying it out. It's looking great. Thank you for making a light mode too. Good luck with your project today! Are you seeing a huge uptick of App Store downloads today?

Obsidian stands out in terms of other apps made for similar purposes, love the simple yet sleek design. Will try to use it for my next research. I love the feature of being able to add links and highlight important parts. Super useful, can't wait to try.

Have been using obsidian desktop for around a year now, and when i say its been a game changer, i actually mean that! Its one of those rare combination of beauty and performance without having to compromise any of core principles of the app! Big Thankyou to @_ericaxu @shida_li for making obsidian and everyone in Discord and Forum for helping out and all those awesome plugins!

A small step for Obsidian notes, and a giant leap for its note making community! Congratulations on the launch

I love Obsidian! After going through all versions of PKM apps and workflows over the years (Evernote, OneNote, DayOne, Roam...) I've settled on Obsidian and have been using it on desktop for a while. I tried using mobile workarounds like 1Writer, but it never worked. Seeing how fast the team iterates and takes users' feedback, it was a no-brainer for me to become a tester of the mobile, even when it was only available to contributors and patrons of the app.

Love the sleek design of Obsidian. Now I have a place to put all my notes and research down in one place. Appreciate the many features available, it makes it perfect for storing all my data. Like that it's available for android as well!

Thank you! I love Obsidian desktop. I own the data. It's instant. It's extendable. Looking forward to trying out mobile too!

I've been looking for this sort of light weight mobile note taking app for a while and can't wait to try this!