Simplenote down?
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Simplenote is frozen on all my devices and when I tried to re-log in on one of them I got a “sorry, we’re having problems at our end message”. It would be nice if such downtimes were posted in this forum, if not just to avert panic among users.
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Seeing issues here as well. I have tested with 3 different systems. Web (Chrome on Mac), Simplenote App on Mac and Simplenote app on iOS. Different notes on each platform. Worst is the app on mac, missing 2 weeks of notes but they were just there earlier today on same Mac. Somehow lost and reverted.
Prob going to export all and then find a replacment as they are no longer supporting. hard to find a simple method to share across WIndows/Mac/iOS -
On further review it seems that Simplenote is no longer in active development and is basically running on autopilot. That’s too bad because I think it’s the best note-taking app, but I guess it’s time to move on. Some recommend Standard Notes as an alternative, but some say it’s also on a glidepath to autopilot.
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I am back on my Windows laptop, and the Windows App is syncing fine to the web; I can edit/update/delete in either location, and the changes are reflected, as of 12:39 pm EST. The iOS and Mac apps aren’t syncing at all, not with each other, the web, or anything. I backed up all my notes from Web and from Windows, and lo and behold, they dont match either. I surely didnt have this on my plate to address today, but now I need to make an unplanned move.
I reinstalled the apps on my iMac, and now there are no Notes on the Mac. So if you were thinking of trying that step to troubleshoot, I would highly advise against it.
I am now looking into this: https://notesnook.com/ as they import Simplenote backups, so that could be my solution.
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Greatest notes app ever… been using & RELYING on it for many years. I really hope they are not going to suddenly leave everyone who trusted them to flounder… could have used a warning for crying out loud. I’ve been telling them for years that I would be happy to pay for the service. Now what? This is ungodly awful.
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I agree completely. I’ve tried so many notes apps and this is *the* one that I’d gladly pay for. Let’s hope this is just a short-term glitch. But if it’s not, it sure would have been nice if we could have been notified so we could all get the life boats ready.
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It’s possible we’re caught up in some corporate shenanigans at Automattic, the company that owns Simplenote. Try searching for recent news on the firm and you’ll see what I mean. Most of it’s flagship products (eg WordPress) are still up and running, but we already know that Simplenote had been put on autopilot…
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Migrating 10,000 Notes from Simplenote to Standard Notes — Preserving Dates and Tags
I recently decided to migrate my Simplenote collection to Standard Notes. I had 9,946 notes dating back to 2014, and preserving the original dates and tags was important.
The built-in Simplenote importer transferred my notes, but it didn’t preserve their original modification dates or tags.What worked
Instead of using the regular Simplenote importer, I used Standard Notes’ native backup format.
Here’s the process:
- Exported my Simplenote collection as JSON.
- Created a couple of notes in Standard Notes and downloaded a decrypted backup from Preferences → Backups → Data Backups.
- Used that backup as a template to convert my Simplenote JSON into Standard Notes’ native backup format, preserving the original creation dates, modification dates, and tag relationships.
- Imported the converted
.txtfile using Preferences → Backups → Import Backup.
The result: All imported notes retained their original dates, contents, and tags.Splitting my collection
Rather than putting nearly 10,000 notes into one account, I divided them by last-modified year:
- Current notes (2024–2026): 5,102 notes
- Historical archive (2023 and earlier): 4,844 notes
I’ve successfully imported the 5,102 recent notes. Everything looks correct, including the original modification dates and tags.
I also discovered that Standard Notes supports multiple workspaces, making it easy to switch between separate accounts. My plan is to keep the historical archive in a second workspace.Final thoughts
I’m going to use Standard Notes for a week before importing the remaining notes, primarily to evaluate synchronization and performance.
The key takeaway: If you’re migrating from Simplenote and want to preserve your original dates and tags, converting your export into Standard Notes’ native backup format and using Import Backup instead of Import Notes worked for me.
Hopefully, this helps someone considering the same migration.
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Hahah…Yeah, I am sure they are calling all the Devs together and opening a bridge call to get to the bottom. My testing continues on Standard Note and so far so good. Nothing missing that Simple offered yet. And its syncing across web/windows/mac/ios and its responsive with my 5000 notes.
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My syncing with the web app and desktop app seems to be working, but not between those apps and the ios app (and vice versa).
@mikerizz Thanks for the tip on migrating to Standard Notes. Would you be willing to share more detailed instructions? For example, I see no way to export Simplenotes as a json file. Thanks!
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Other note apps are good but none offer the same simplicity as this one. I might move to an iphone for apple notes.
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Due to this somewhat concerning outage and lack of response, I just looked into and tried out UpNote, PrivacyNotes, Joplin, Notesnook, Standard Notes, Obsidian, Bear, and Apple Notes. In my opinion, everything I listed prior to Standard Notes is dead on arrival because of clunky interface. For example, I pasted a long note into the Notesnook iOS app and it hung on it for several seconds before it pastes. Many of the other ones are instant. Regardless, I think really only those last 4 that I listed are comparable to Simplenote. So at least if you use iOS I would advise against UpNote, PrivacyNotes, Joplin, Notesnook. Even if not using iOS, their interfaces are rough enough that I’d avoid them. Standard Notes is pretty bad too but I wasn’t quite able to justify its elimination. Obsidian is decent but way different and very involved. Where I’ve personally landed is either Bear or Apple Notes. I’ve known about Bear for a long time so I almost skipped it, but it’s wonderful and very similar to Simplenote. Apple Notes is similar too. I like Apple Notes a little less than Bear in just about every way (interface, import/export, etc) but it’s free and 1st party. I do worry that Apple will randomly screw their notes app up though. I think I’m gonna try Bear and cough up the $30/year to enable cloud sync. There’s also what seems like a great tool for importing from Simplenote: https://noahliebman.net/2023/04/simplenote-to-bear-importer/
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Bear does look nice, but I’m really wary that it uses iCloud for sync. iCloud doesn’t work very well for me at all …regularly takes a day to sync a single document between two Macs in the same house, or update photos from the phones, etc.
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This morning it looks like the web app (app.simplennote.com) and the MacOS app are working. (They may have been working yesterday too, but I was on the road with just my iPhone and iPad.) In any case, it’s obvious from chatter I’ve picked up here and there that Simplenote is now orphaned so it’s time to move on. Because I’m a 100% Apple guy, I just bit the bullet and exported my Simplenote entries from the web app and imported them into Apple Notes. It was really easy, and because I really embraced the simplicity of Simplenotes, I just did a plain text export and it went very smoothly. After this, I didn’t feel like taking a risk with some third-party notes app again, because of the risk of being dropped with no notice like in this case, and this functionality is absolutely mission critical for me. Plus, I doubt that one day I’ll try to log in to Apple Notes and find out that Apple discontinued support for it. There would at least be an advance notice.
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The risk with Apple Notes is that they screw up their own apps as they often do. I like it right now but they’re such a big company catering to so many people that they might change Notes on a whim. The good news is they probably wouldn’t radically change the whole concept, but I could imagine key features breaking, being abandoned, or being removed. See the ever-changing Photos app on iOS. Also, there’s a very unpleasant stutter when I swipe to hide the keyboard in Notes on iOS. Not a big issue but I do that constantly and it’s pretty annoying. Bear is better but yeah, it’s 3rd party. Those are the only two apps that I think have shared philosophy with Simplenote and solid execution. I want to love the others I listed because some have such cool features but they’re non-starters due to the UI/UX.
