I remember Bear was getting popular at the time that Evernote had its first massive pushback.
Someone at Evernote decided that people want more AI in their notes, which unsurprisingly turned out to be wrong and drove some people out of their platform. I liked some features of Evernote but was never hard set on using it. I already had some reasons to switch - it was expensive, and the app looked a bit more corporate and complex for my use case. So that little mashup at the time was enough for me to look for other options. And I quickly found about Bear.
It covered most of the requirements I have about the apps I use:
- ✅ Minimal design
- ✅ Independent or small company
- ✅ Simple product with simple features
I can’t recommend Bear for taking too complex and work-related notes (depends on the field), but I will highly recommend it for everything else. It’s easy to use, syncs across all devices (Apple Ecosystem only, sorry), it has a tagging system, it’s markdown centric, it’s cheap, and it’s beautiful.
Bear is my daily note taking driver for more than 2 years now. I use it on 3 devices. I back up and organise my notes every week. Every idea starts there. The knowledge surrounding every project that I work on is managed there. I plan everything around my life there. And I’m not leaving it anytime soon.