Android

Inkdrop

Github-flavoured Markdown, status per note, end-to-end encryption, revision history, and over 100 plugins! This is amazing for an app costing only USD 4.99 a month

Stone

22 Apr 2023 • 3 min read

Welcome to Episode #83 of my journey to find the best Android note-taking app and Eid Mubarak to any followers celebrating! I ran out of good local-first apps so I have recently been testing apps that require a cloud: someone else's computer, not yours. This week it's Inkdrop.

This app is developed by a single person which is really impressive. Takuya Matsuyama is from Osaka, Japan and has an insane following on YouTube with 169,000 followers and on Twitter with 16,600 followers.

The Web version of Inkdrop is very customizable using CSS/Less and themes. The Android version has some customizations like font and font size but there are no menus to choose the values so you have to type in the font size and font family name and I didn't know the possible ranges or values.

What's incredible is Takuya has developed apps for several platforms.

Inkdrop is available for macOS 10.11.4 (El Capitan) or later, Windows 8.1 or later, and Ubuntu Linux 18.04 or later. Mobile app is also available for iOS 13+ and Android 8.0+.

The Android app feels like a companion to the Web version and is more limited. That said, Inkdrop supports GitHub-flavoured Markdown, status per note, end-to-end encryption, revision history, and has over 100 plugins! This is amazing for an app costing only USD 4.99 a month or 49.99 annually which explains why he has so many users.

For anyone who is technically savvy, it has an API and you can roll your own Inkdrop server:

If you don't trust anyone with your data, you can set up your own CouchDB server to store your data instead of the Inkdrop server.

Read on to see the ugly, the bad, the good, the great, and the awesome aspects of Inkdrop.

Screenshots

Ugly

The indent and outdent buttons seemed to remove the text on the line

Bad

Tag UI is confusing
No WYSIWYG editing
The Android app has not been updated in a year
Change font doesn't provide a menu of available fonts, you have to type in the name of the font
Changing font size it's not clear what the values can be, just a text input field and there's no preview of the result
No export to Markdown, HTML, or PDF from the app but you can from the Web
No image thumbnail/preview in the note list

Good

Text formatting: bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough
6 heading levels
Pin a note
Tags on notes
Duplicate a note
Bullet
Numbered (ordered) list
Inline checklist
Horizontal line
Hyperlink
Trash
Nice default font
Shows tags in the note list
Preview mode
Distraction-free mode
Dark mode
Option to show line numbers
Change font size
Change font
Undo and redo
Toolbar
Inline images
Sort by date created, date modified
Quote and block quote
Code and code block
Indent and outdent

Great

Clear and concise default notes with Markdown help
Notebooks (folders)
Markdown table support
Note status: active, on hold, completed, dropped
Keyboard shortcuts
Option to show invisible characters
Table of contents
Mermaid
Math
Flowchart
Chrome and Firefox plugins for clipping Web pages

Awesome

GitHub flavoured Markdown
End-to-end (E2E) encryption
Revision history!
Share a public URL for a note
View as Markdown button on the Public URL version of the note
Has an API
Plugins