Sign in Subscribe
Markdown Featured

Obsidian for Android review - 2025

A refreshed review of the amazing Obsidian note-taking app for Android and updates on me for the past year.

Stone

• 6 min read
Obsidian for Android review - 2025

I'm baaaackkk! Well, just for today.

I felt the need to put up a new post because I get people signing up for these reviews daily and I need to say hello plus update people on Obsidian. At this point there are 555 people signed up for this newsletter and I won't list all of the new subscribers because it would be too long. Instead, a quick note of thanks to each of you for signing up! Make sure to check out my sister site https://noteapps.softr.app/.

What I've been up to

Since my last post just under a year ago, I started a new hobby making t-shirts, mostly for myself and a few friends and family members. You can check it out at https://mrtee.ca and yeah, it's not pretty. Luckily, I didn't sell a lot since my new role at work became overwhelming mid last year.

I continue to work on my ongoing passion, ahem obsession, with archiving. I've migrated all of my emails from Palm Pilot (yes!), Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and now Fastmail plus all LinkedIn, SMS chats, and Signal chats into Markdown. I published the Python scripts on GitHub. If you're bored and want to read some of the context and history, I wrote a couple of Medium posts on it.

More recently I started another hobby writing about Microsoft Planner Premium, a tool we're rolling out at work. If you know anyone using the tool, please pass along the site 🤗. I'm not sure how long I will do that but it's fun to learn in public and share.

What happened with NoteApps?

Since I stopped this hobby, the r/noteapps community on reddit kept growing slowly and is now at 663 members. On X (ugh, it pains me to even mention that site) there are just over 1,000 followers slightly down from last year but I don't go there anymore. Facebook page? Well, it's as dead as it ever was.

Periodically I receive emails from people saying that my blog has helped them in their search for an app and some people share tips like this one I got just yesterday from Vika:

Been enjoying reading through your Android note taking app reviews today! Finding the best note taking app is hard work! I ended up using Notally for along time, but was setting up a new Graphene OS phone for a friend when I noticed that someone forked Notally and gave it a great update. Its called NotallyX and if its not on your list of todo reviews it should be.

I am asked regularly what note-taking app I use now. I continue using  Obsidian on mobile and desktop as my main note-taking app as well as Drafting on Android for quick capture. I keep NotesHub on my phone as I really like the integration with GitHub. Let me update you on Obsidian!

Obsidian

I've been using Obsidian for several years now and wrote the original review on Android version 0.15.6 three years ago. The mobile app has improved a lot since I wrote that review and eventually graduated to a 1.0 version in Oct 2022. So much has changed and improved that it deserves a revised writeup.

This was my impression 3 years ago:

I wanted to love Obsidian for Android because it's Canadian but I don't, not yet. It made me think way too much to use it to a point of frustration. The UI is awkward on a smartphone as it's trying to replicate the desktop UI. Initial loading is quite slow. It has markdown support, outlining, and the extensibility is incredible with themes and plugins supported by a large and loyal community of Developers / Scripters.

The last sentence remains true and the community across many mediums is alive and thriving which still blows my mind. I just checked and at this moment there are 12,000 people (yes twelve thousand) online in Obsidian's #general Discord channel alone!

The company itself has grown from the two original founders / developers and that resulted in a lot more functionality being delivered as well as many improvements. In February 2023, they hired Steph Ango as their CEO and now have a team of 8 excluding the cat.

The app is hard for many people to start using still but once you get used to it, you will never go back to anything else. The idea that the notes are yours, all yours is key. Everything is stored in atomic Markdown files that will live for as long as there is power and a simple computer. No need for a cloud unless you want to synchronize across devices and, of course, back them up.

You can subscribe to their Obsidian Sync service or synchronize your files with other tools. I use the free Syncthing which runs on my laptop, my UNRAID "server" in the basement, and Syncthing Fork on my smartphone. It works like a charm. Every so often, I end up with a synch conflict which takes me a few minutes to cleanup.

I now have 60,845 files in my main Obsidian vault, their term for a main folder. That is decades of my communications plus personal notes, some photos, and attachments. Having all of this in one place with fast search and links between them took a lot of effort but, to me, it was worth it. I know exactly where my data is and I have full control over it.

Some key improvements over the past few years:

  • Performance optimizations for faster startup times and reduced lag when editing large files
  • The user experience is now much better on a mobile phone, originally it was just the desktop version on a smartphone. It has an improved mobile editor with better touch controls and gesture support and better navigation drawer design and bottom toolbar options
  • Canvas support - the ability to visualize your notes connected to each other. Not extremely useful on Android smartphone but very useful on the desktop version.
  • Frontmatter support keeps improving with field types, autocomplete for lists, and validations. I use this a lot to keep metadata (data about my notes) at the top of each note so I can find them later.
  • Enhanced plugin compatibility, with more desktop plugins functioning properly on Android
  • Better sync functionality across devices, including improvements to Obsidian Sync for mobile
  • Better handling of attachments and media files on Android

The rest of this post is in the style of all of my reviews. I hope that it is helpful and that this post finds you and yours in good health and spirits.

About

Ugly

  • Nothing!

Bad

  • No export to PDF on Android - you can on the Desktop version
  • No quick export to formatted text into an email
  • Help doesn't appear to be specific to the mobile but shared with the desktop and other platforms
  • No import file - but easy to copy/paste into a note
  • No WebDAV support – which I no longer need since I stopped using NextCloud

Good

  • Markdown support
  • Text formatting: bold, italics, code, headings, quotes
  • Numbered lists
  • Headings
  • Hyperlinks – need to learn the Markdown format or use a button
  • Text highlighting
  • Search results sort by date created, modified, filename
  • Star a note and filter starred notes
  • Inline checklist items [x]

Great

  • Indent / Outdent for outlining
  • Mermaid support
  • Tags and tag pane
  • Audio recording! – but you have to enable it in settings
  • Dark theme / mode
  • Inline images
  • Show and hide sections
  • Cross device sync - if you use their service
  • Toolbar very handy with formatting options
  • Customizable toolbar – you can re-order or hide the ones you don't use
  • Ability to specify an attachment folder
  • Tons of settings, customizations like font size
  • Share a note as Markdown '.md' file
  • Powerful search
  • Multiple "vaults" – basically folders of notes but with separate themes etc. which is interesting

Awesome

  • Apps for many platforms
  • Frontmatter support
  • Can use it completely offline without a cloud
  • Linking between notes with wikilink format, e.g. [[Summer Vacay]]
  • Thousands of plugins
  • Themes, my favorite was Sanctum but now I use the default theme

Resolved

The following items from my original review are solved!

  • Couldn't figure out how to "close a note"
  • Once I split the view vertically, I couldn't figure out how to un-split it (see first bullet) - function removed which makes sense
  • Multiple open notes is useless on a smartphone, at least with the current UI - they've implemented this quite nicely now with tabs and a counter e.g. [2] at the bottom of the UI which, when clicked, shows how many files you have open and a nice preview window to switch between notes
  • Pin a note and the UI was unusable, the note becomes one column wide. It took me forever to figure out what the issue was until I unpinned the note.
  • UI is confusing moving between notes
  • Splitting UI vertically on a smartphone is not useful, again trying to apply the same UI constructs as the desktop app
  • Markdown format importer didn't make sense to me to be so prominent when I couldn't find a way to import a file in the app
  • Commands on the side describes key combinations like "hot key" Ctrl+S to save but my smartphone doesn't have a keyboard. Maybe this is an homage to the BlackBerry folks :)

Sign up for more like this.

Enter your email
Subscribe