Quillpad

Stone -

Another week, another app review. This week it's Episode # 76 of the silly, fun, and insane adventure to find the best Android note-taking app, for me. I've come up with a new definition:

Spending countless hours installing, testing, and tracking up to 300 features of 100+ Android note-taking apps over an 18 month period is insane!

It's a bit of groundhog day this week. But first, a note from our sponsors.

💡
Welcome to Micu from Romania, Dennis from Taiwan, and Eros from India - quite the name on that last one! Thank you for subscribing!

I kid. This newsletter is completely free but open for donations and sure enough, 1 of the 199 subscribers actually donated, besides Janet! If this were a company, it would've been bankrupt before Episode 1 was published. Alas, I can still afford the $11/mo Ghost fee plus a few paid apps here and there. Luckily Quillpad is free.

Quillpad was created by Arumugam Jeganathan (aka "jsixface") who, according to his profile, lives in Boston and with contributions from Felix Fischer who is based in Munich. The software is a "fork" – clone – of QuillNote which was developed by Michael Soultanidis, the 14th app that I reviewed. Michael had stopped working on it, so it's good that it was re-incarnated: thank you jsixface! I just wanted to type that again.

This app is open-source, free, fast, supports images and audio recording, checklists, tables, backup and restore, and best of all it syncs with Nextcloud! This hits almost all of my requirements. Kudos and glad to see it being maintained.

Read on for the bad, the good, the great, and the awesome aspects of Quillpad!

Screenshots

Quotes

Take beautiful markdown notes and stay organized with task lists. Fork of Quillnote

Meta

Ugly

  • Nothing

Bad

  • URL dialog seems to jump up and down, don't like that
  • Note colours are fugly
  • Icon used for bullets feels too big
  • No tags in notes
  • No search within notes
  • No linking of notes (in the backlog)
  • No export to PDF, but you can print to PDF using Android

Good

  • Text formatting: bold, italics, strikethrough
  • Highlight
  • Horizontal line
  • Underline on headings
  • 6 Heading levels
  • code and code blocks
  • Tags on notes
  • Tag list
  • 7 Colors on notes (see bad)
  • Inline bullets
  • Inline checklists
  • Ordered lists
  • Attach image, photo
  • Quotes and blockquote
  • Hyperlinks
  • Toolbar
  • Toolbar item to go to the top or bottom of the note
  • Undo and redo
  • Duplicate a note
  • Dark mode
  • Change the date and time format
  • Show date created, modified
  • Pin a note
  • Move one or more notes to another notebook
  • Archive a note
  • Preview mode
  • Export to ZIP
  • Notebooks
  • Trash
  • Search across notes
  • Sort by title, date created, or date modified
  • Delete notes in the trash after 7, 14, 30 days, or never, or instantly

Great

  • No ads
  • Tables
  • Toolbar item to create a table
  • Shows images in the note list
  • Reminder on note
  • Hide a note
  • Record audio
  • Backup and restore
  • 2 Android shortcuts: make a list, take a note
  • Select multiple notes at a time
  • Puts a line under Headings
  • 5 colour schemes: blue, green, pink, orange, purple

Awesome

  • Free
  • Fast
  • Local-first
  • Open-Source
  • Shows tables in note list
  • Sync to Nextcloud

You reached the end, no more soup for you!