Evernote in 2023. A Year in Review.
Back in the early days of Evernote, not a lot happened.
We’d receive a new release a couple of times a year, a new feature once in a while but Evernote was a snail when it came to development.
That all changed this year. There’s much going on, lots of changes and the odd bit of drama.
Here’s my review of Evernote’s 2023.
January
This is where the new Evernote story began. Bending Spoons took control of Evernote in the first week of January 2023.
We knew it was happening beforehand, but it was all official during the first week of the year.
The CEO posted a nice message on the blog mentioning that he’d been a user since 2012 which offered comfort to folk.
January also saw the introduction of Backlinks in the Evernote app. This was a pretty big feature as it made it much easier to relate notes to each other.
February
This was a quiet month. Bending Spoons had only just got the keys to Evernote so no big releases or announcements.
The most popular article of the month was all about productivity app swapping and how it’s not very productive!
March
Another quiet month on the release front for Evernote, maybe the calm before the storm that was coming in April.
The most popular article here on TTT was about Evernote Home. I put together a four-part series talking about widgets, calendars, tasks and more.
April
This was a busy month!
The price went up, drama ensued and the Real Time Edit feature was introduced.
My own opinion on the price increase is that it needed to go up. My hourly rate has gone up steadily over the last 10 years but for some reason Evernote just seemed to charge the same.
If you paid $45 in 2016 then you were paying it at the beginning of 2023. This grandfathered pricing is ridiculous, no one else does it apart from tech companies and it’s all subsidised by venture capital money.
When the VCs want to cash in and the company needs to finally make profit, the price has to go up.
My prediction for 2024 is that other notetaking and productivity apps will increase their prices and the practice of grandfathering will slowly come to an end.
On a positive note, Real Time Editing was a big new feature and it started well, then hit a bit of a buggy time and then straightened itself out.
Right now, RTE works a treat and sync is much, much faster. Pretty much instant for me. I love how I can move from device to device and the notes are just there.
May
Ai Cleanup was released and went down quite well.
If you’re notes are a mess, or you clip recipes and other stuff from the web then the clean-up tool can tidy things up a fair bit.
If you’re notes are nice and tidy, then it doesn’t tend to do a lot!
I’m looking forward to seeing how it progresses during 2024.
June
There was a lot of work going on in the background stabilising the Real Time Editing and new sync technology. By the end of June things were working a lot smoother.
The Web Clipper got a nice update with a multi-select feature being added.
This was huge. The Evernote web clipper is one of the most powerful out there and being able to select specific areas of a web page and then clip them to a note was a huge improvement.
July
A HUGE month for Evernote as the company was relocated from the US to Italy.
The vast majority of the staff in the US were made redundant and all the operations were bought in-house at Bending Spoons.
It’s horrible for the folks involved but on the business side it was probably the best decision. A lot of the work can take place within the same time-zone and things can move a lot quicker.
By the end of July, the issues with Real Time Sync were pretty much solved.
August
August saw the removal of Two Factor Authorisation by SMS text.
This improved security for the whole app, and I think made a lot of folks more aware of auth apps in general. I’ve spoken to a number of people who never used them until Evernote made these changes.
Evernote published a fairly technical blog post about what they were up to.
This was the first time we heard the phrase “The Monolith” in relation to the big old Java programme that was/is running the core functionality of Evernote.
The big re-write is still in progress and I think we’re starting to see the benefits of this with a more stable app experience.
September
A big feature month! Ai Powered Search was launched.
I was right in there with the testing and I found the feature to be useful.
I’ve spoken about it a fair bit. You need to have descriptive notes, so the Ai knows what to look for and you need to be fairly specific with your questions.
I’m really looking forward to how it progresses.
In a perfect world I’d like to see a private, personal Ai that learns from our own notetaking and behaviour but doesn’t send data anywhere. It just works for all of us on an individual basis using only Evernote’s servers.
Almost like having a personal research assistant for your notes.
October
No new features in October but we did get an outage!
Something went wrong during a migration that was part of the monolith rewrite mentioned earlier and it took Evernote down for a few hours.
I noticed it down for about 5 or 6 hours myself maybe a little less. It wasn’t all day.
One thing the outage did teach me was that the offline functionality of the apps made it seem like nothing much had happened. I carried on working and accessing my notes and then once things were fixed everything synced back up to the cloud.
November
Evernote web got a little love in November.
There was a big update whereby the local database structure of the web version was changed and for some larger accounts the boost in speed was around X16!
Evernote web was not a place I visited often because it did take a while to load up. You could go and make a coffee whilst all your notes downloaded.
Now, for me, this is just a few seconds.
When I record podcasts, I’m now back to split screen in my browser with Cleanfeed on the left and Evernote web on the right.
Huge improvement.
December
There was drama in December!
This is the month that will go down in history, the never-ending free plan almost ended.
Restrictions were bought in that limited all free users to a maximum of 50 notes and 1 notebook.
I’m not really surprised that this happened. Free forever with any company will not last forever.
For the folk who had been using Evernote for free for anything up to 15 years it was a huge shock. They were used to having a pretty powerful app for nothing. I’m pretty sure a lot of them will either pay or move to another service.
I think at some point in 2024 we’ll see other note taking apps restrict their own free plans especially as venture capitalists want returns to invest in the new Ai startups.
What’s going to happen in 2024?
Hopefully lots to look forward to.
Evernote are continuing to work on rewriting the server-side and making it more modern, easier to update and manage in the future.
There’s already been hints at a new user interface and I’ve seen bits of it. Hopefully not long to wait for this one.
Outlook calendar sync is still coming.
New fancy code blocks with syntax highlighting are still coming and I’m looking forward to this for all my code snippets.
There’s also been hints at updates to the Ai Cleanup tool which would be good. The opportunities for this are huge when you start looking at things like translation, grammar checking etc.
I would love to see the Ai Cleanup tool work on non-text items in notes. Maybe tidying up images or transcribing audio.
A lot of the work during 2023 has been server-side, on the back end. I think we’ll start to see much more user-facing improvements starting to happen in 2024.
I’m up for it. Always looking forward!
I’m done now for the Christmas break and off to find a nice bottle of Penderyn single malt Welsh whiskey to enjoy.
Whatever you’re doing have a great time.
All the best
Jon
There are apps that don't do venture funding.
And there are apps that do venture funding but have found success selling their products to Enterprise customers.
And there are other apps whose service sets a hard cap on total storage quotas, instead of providing monthly quotas but unlimited total storage caps.
So it is incorrect to say that 2024 will be the year when note-taking apps will begin to escalate their subscription costs.
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Regarding price changes - I wouldn't say it's accurate either. Hardware costs have fallen. A lot of software capabilities have now been developed by cloud providers and app providers as well, such as version conflict, large file storage, rich text editors, attachment previews, cross-platform UI toolkits, etc. This is the reason why a single dev from Vietnam (UpNote) or a 3-man team from Pakistan (NotesNook) have been able to develop a near Evernote alternative in reasonable costs.
The price increase is in manpower costs and the "plus factor". As customers, we would see that in the form of the customer support and engagement, the software release & bugfix schedule, and unique features that no one else can offer. Has it all been there? Partially.
Thanks for this summary of 2023, Jon. Putting it down like that reminds us of what has been achieved,
releases for desktop starting with v10.62.1, not to mention mobil releases. Thanks for your continued commentary throughout the year, let's hope there'll be plenty of positive things to post about in 2024.