Material Notes

Happy New Year (Eve)!!

The rabbit hole was a lot deeper than I thought! This year I reviewed 55 Android apps and the only time that I was unable to post a review was when I had my mild concussion. Now that's dedication or maybe obsession!

I consider myself extremely lucky to end the year in relatively good health, to have great support from friends and family, to be in OK spirits, and to have a new job where they gave me, of all things, an iPhone! I will play with Apple Notes, likely with OneNote since that's what the org uses, and I'm hoping to get approval to use Obsidian!

For the last review of 2022, I'm keeping it simple and reviewing a little app that impressed me even though it has some issues.

Material Notes

Material Notes is a basic note-taking app so if all you need is to quickly capture text notes, then it is great for that. I really enjoyed using it with its clean UI and no-frills fast interface. The colours and fonts are great and I'm finding that those two things are what make me want to go back and use an app again. Yes, it's superficial, but if an app does what it should and it looks and feels good to use, then that's the sweet spot.

On the downside, the app hasn't been updated since 2016. This would be OK if there were no issues but there are a couple that need to be fixed based on some of the Google Play reviews and the little testing that I did.

If you have 10 mins and need a fast capture app for your fleeting notes, check out this app.

Screenshots

Meta

• Score: 7/10
• Version: 1.6.3
• Google Play rating: 4.4*
• Developer: cw fei
• Google Play
• email: developer.cwfei@gmail.com
• Location: Pahang, Malaysia
• Last updated: 2016-10-09

Ugly

• No attachments
• No updates for 6 years
• Couldn't find the privacy policy but since it's local may not be a big issue
• From Google Play comment

This app has a TERRIBLE bug where it silently truncates notes over about 4400 characters

Bad

• Send a note via email puts the note title in the body not the subject line
• Font changes only apply to the title and note list
• Everything is a checklist item or nothing is (no inline checklists)
• No Markdown support
• No text formatting
• No bullets, you have to type "- " each time

Good

• Nice font
• Checklists (see Bad)
• Dark mode
• Export as text
• Star a note
• Filter starred notes
• Quickly add a note
• Fast search
• Dark mode (but odd that it's on a per-note basis!)
• Export as text
• 5 fonts
• Nice default font
• Star a note
• Filter by starred notes
• Lock notes with a PIN
• Trash
• Archive
• Sort by date
• Shows lasted edited date

Great

• Very fast
• Clean UI
• Backup and restore notes
• Change the number of lines of a note shown in its preview in the notes list: 1 to 10 lines or all lines
• 1 Android widget to show a specific note on the home screen with its material colour

Awesome

• Free
• Local-first (local only)
• Super easy reminders
• 25 note colours, nice vibrant colours