Keep is an excellent note-taking app — hey Google, please don’t kill it.
Google’s excellent and neglected note-taking app is getting some much-needed formatting options and overall love. Here’s hoping it’s not the last time.
Good news for Android-toting Google Keep users: you’re finally getting the text formatting options the app has so desperately needed for years.
Google announced this week that the ability to bold, italicize, and otherwise transform text in your notes is rolling out now, and you should start to see it in the app soon.
(I don’t have it yet, but Mishaal Rahman and a few others actually spotted the feature ahead of its official launch, so it seems to be coming fast.)
And actually, Google has been paying an unusual amount of attention to Keep recently: users got a new homescreen widget earlier this year, and you can now open multiple Keep windows at a time on your device.
That makes users reasonably worried that Google might at any moment kill the app, as it has so many others, as part of some cost-cutting or refocusing initiative.
The formatting options will presumably be available on the web and iOS at some point, and they make Keep even more powerful on top of that simple interface.
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I am assuming someone will write a converter / exporter and that we'll have at least a week's warning before it gets its place in the Google Graveyard.
If Google Takeout outlives it, we might already have one.
I'm pretty certain they wanted to migrate everyone over to Tasks for a bit there, I got a few reminders to import my Keep lists to it, but for some reason they were struggling with basic feature parity with Keep and it overall didn't really make a whole lot of sense, as it just seemed to be a more complicated tool that struggled to be integrated with voice reminders.
It's impressive to me that the same company that makes Google Maps seems to struggle so much with a basic note taking app
Which is so silly because it should be relatively obvious that people use keep for more than Tasks. But this is Google we're talking about so nothing should surprise me.
I've been wondering if it could be accomplished using ignore patterns in Syncthing to only share a specific Obsidian folder/directory and put everything shared in there. Yet, this may probably be too much friction for a grocery list and Keep will work fine while it lasts.
I find keep terrifically useful. But it is not supported by Google Takeout, so when they turn it off, I'd lose everything. I'm currently trying out sNotz from f-droid as a replacement.
You could use Google-assistant smart speakers to add things to specific non-Keep shopping lists - e.g. Any.Do and Bring are two that spring to mind. Google killed this integration a few months back to force users into using Keep if they wanted to retain this functionality.
Their last update to the home screen widget ruined the styling and usability of it. Made all the controls and notes take up a ton more space by turning them into big dumb child buttons, leaving way less room for actual content. I switched to Zoho notes.
I have always wanted to use keep as my main note-taking app, but no import option and not being to store most attachments mostly kills it for me. Most of my notes have some form of attachment. Mostly images, but PDFs and a couple of others are also in there. I’m sticking with apple notes for now. Yes, I have tried all the others and still do.
I think that on android the only really good option is probably Evernote. Not a bad option and I know it gets a lot of criticism but evernote can pretty much take anything you give it and is extremely flexible. The fact that it’s cross platform is a bonus.