Apple Notes is underrated. There is no flashy features to distract you. Just you and your notes.
- note data stored in a proprietary format
- no way to access note data from other apps/api
- no way to export in bulk, or in any other format than PDF (a terrible format for notes)
- iCloud sync is a mildly terrifying thing to entrust important data to
I use Apple Notes for the occasional quick grocery list but that's about it.
Thing about Apple Notes is in spite of the open ideals, if you're in the apple ecosystem, it's just easily there, on all devices, very unassuming and simply, and that's so so very valuable.
It's the long view that gets me. Over the last 20 years, if i'm in the Apple ecosystem, notes are there, synced across everything, and it's just text. and it's simple.
I tried really hard to love Notes. I wanted to. For the reasons you note, and this one, and many others, I couldn’t.
I've never experienced data loss due to icloud sync YMMV
I've never had iCloud Sync display any weird behavior in Apple Notes, and I've got thousands in there. I have, absolutely, seen Obsidian Sync delete notes I did not delete, and fail to upload notes; both of these were generally remediable via their recycle bin, but still very concerning.
All of these complaints are of the nature of "I don't actually have anything valuable to write down so I'd rather worry about the nature of the tool than what I'm writing". And, to be clear, I think this is why Notion is so popular, just for different reasons than your's; it looks great, and makes you feel productive because you've got amazing cross-referenced tables and hyperbacklinks and h1h2h3s and then wait where's the content?
When you have tens of thousands of notes, it's hard to even know if at some point, the note has been suddenly changed, reverted, or modified in a way that you didn't even realize occurred.
With an open format, specifically a text based one like Markdown, I can sync all my notes to a git repository in a diffable manner that I can quickly review.
sqlite3 "~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite"
This is because it needs to support CRDT style syncing.
But the schemas have been decoded so you can access it using pretty much any language.
A relevant and somewhat meta example: This year they added disclosable sections, which were previously a differentiator for Notion. That's in addition to handwriting selection and editing, voice memos, collaborative editing… Not to mention it's still a regular app and you can have as many note windows as you want.
But it just needs to be a bit more open and extendable. Give me good tables, proper linking between notes and a graph view (or at least an API so I can build that myself) and I'll be back forever.
Notes is also quite terrible at many things:
* Embedded photos cannot be resized or placed next to text
* Table support is incredibly limited, to the point of being unusable except as a rudimentary grid
* No support for multiple columns
* No table of contents view
* No linking between notes (I think?)
* No way to change the font or change out the dreary yellow background colour
* No syntax highlighting of embedded code fragment
* No support for equations
* No support for shorthands (e.g. # to get a level 1 headline)
Notion, for all its flaws, has all of the above. And its collaborative editing is solid, if maybe not as good as Google Docs.