I am so glad I found this app, because I was getting close to thinking I had to build my own to fit my needs. I use notes, spreadsheets, and the Excalidraw plug-in all the time. Indispensable.
Hey everyone,
Our Android app just came out of beta so I thought it would be a great time to share it with everyone here. With help from contributors from all around the world, we're now officially on every major platform: Web, iOS, Mac, PC, Linux, and Android. If you're not familiar with Standard Notes, it's an extremely standard notes app, but aims to be un-standard every other way.
Where other notes apps focus on excessive features and endless growth, we focus on making an app that doesn't implode from its own complexity. Notes are some of the most important byproducts of our existence, and we should be able to read them fifty years from now. But when you entrust growth-minded companies with your notes, you can't always tell how long they'll stick around, or in what ways they'll attempt to make money off you in the future. We focus on creating the simplest form of a notes app, making it easy to maintain and support in the long run. It also has the added effect that a lot of users notice quickly: "it just works".
Every part of Standard Notes is open source. This way, the lifetime of the ecosystem doesn't depend on us. It can exist indefinitely.
Our revenue model is based on a pay-as-you-feel subscription that offers subscribers optional extensions that can enhance functionality, like Markdown editors or Note history. You can find out more on that here: https://standardnotes.org/extended.
Excited to share with the Product Hunt community. Please let me know if you have any thoughts, feedback, or suggestions. We're also over at @StandardNotes on Twitter.
@bitario love the mission but I'm curious how you square "we should be able to read [our notes] fifty years from now" with end-to-end encryption? Won't we swap computers, devices, etc, over the next 50 years? I suppose one should encrypt their harddrives and backups, but won't this make it harder to access our files in the future if we lose the encryption keys?
@chrismessina hey, thanks, glad you like the mission. That's a good point to bring up, since it's natural for us to misplace or forget our keys. But the mission in longevity is more than just about your notes, but about the entire ecosystem as a whole. We want to build (or have built) a platform that is so easy to maintain that it's inexpensive and trivial to keep up to date through the years. If we had to start from scratch and rebuild this thing, due to say some apocalyptic fire, it would take us weeks. With Evernote, with all its features, complexity, and intricacies, it would take years. So that's one point — applications so simple that they can be maintained for extended periods of time.
The other point is the portability aspect. The data format is specified in detail by the Standard File protocol (https://standardfile.org), and that's not owned by anyone, and is open for everyone to use and build on. So, you're not relying on some proprietary data format owned by a private corporation to host your important data. That's another +1 for longevity.
Lastly is the open source aspect. Right now, Standard Notes depends on a few people to remain up to date. But even if we all got run over by a bus, it wouldn't take long for the community to spring up a new server or new application instance. It's all really easy to set up and readily available on Github (https://github.com/standardnotes).
Lastly, data backups are a huge part of the ecosystem. Every platform supports easy exporting of your data in both encrypted and decrypted plain text formats. Also, extensions allow you to easily set up Dropbox backups (and soon Google Drive, or any other arbitrary storage). That's another +1 for longevity of your data.
Regarding the encryption keys, it's password-based, so as long as you can remember or store your main password, you're good. True that some people will forget or lose it. But with the advent of password managers and strong advocacy all around the web for more responsible password practices, I'm hoping this will become less of a problem in the future. But you definitely have to trust yourself first and foremost not to forget it. If you can't trust yourself, then there's always unencrypted backups that you can make.
Hope that answers your question.
@bitario I am a huge supporter of open source projects and since this looks like a handy app (that's also cross-platform!) I will definitely try it out.
Standard Notes
Raycast
Standard Notes
It's open source software. https://github.com/standardnotes
Pros:Simplicity. Privacy. Flawless app ecosystem.
Cons:Literally no better alternative.