Android

MarkNote

MarkNote is a local-first, open-source, Markdown app with a ton of functionality and all for free. You can back up and restore your files, synchronize them with OneDrive, and export them to PDF, HTML, or an image.

Stone

06 Nov 2022 • 2 min read

Welcome to app review #61 in my quest to find the best Android note-taking app, for me. MarkNote comes close and is developed by Shouheng Wang who is the same person that developed Leaf Note which I reviewed last week.

MarkNote is a local-first, open-source, Markdown app with a ton of functionality and all for free. You can backup and restore your files, synchronize them with OneDrive, and export them to PDF, HTML, or an image.

Screenshots

Quotes

MarkNote is an open sourced Markdown note-taking application with the material [design] styled UI. The application now has many cool features, including basic [markdown grammars], MathJax, HTML etc.

The main purpose of making it open source is for communication and studying. At the same time, we hope that you can join the [development] to make it benefit to more users.

Ugly

Last updated 2.5 years ago
The User Guide and Change Log pages in GitHub are empty
No ability to sort or filter from the note list

Bad

Rendering image is slow
No support for tags in or on notes but you can have #tag text at least
No ability to link notes
Share via text via Fastmail client shares it as Markdown, not text – if you know what I mean!
No audio attachments
No WYSIWYG editing

Good

Text formatting: bold, italics, underline, strikethrough
code

Code block

Hyperlinks
Attach images
Inline checkboxes
Indent and outdent
Quote
Blockquote
Cursor left or right buttons on the toolbar
Horizontal line
Notebooks with colour
Toolbar
3 languages: Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English
Trash
Undo and redo
Archive a note
Backup and restore
Export to text
Search within a note
Search across notes
Categories (folders)
Customize icons and colour of categories

Great

Markdown support
Inline Markdown image links
Outline
Create a basic sketch
Fingerprint authentication on the app
Password on the app
Share via email (Markdown)
Copy contents of the entire note
8 background colours
Shows a thumbnail of the image in the note list
Shows a thumbnail of the sketch in the note list
Export to HTML
Add a shortcut to note on the Android home screen

Awesome

Local-first
Free
Open-Source (AGPL-3.0 license)
Synchronize files with OneDrive
Backup to and restore from SD card
Markdown Tables
Toolbar button to make tables easily
Export to PDF
Export to image
A timeline view of file changes