I wanted to share that my favorite note editor is going to release soon the iOS beta version. I have access to the bear 2 beta on MacOS but I have been reluctant to try it because I need sync capabilities. So I’ve just been using base Bear.
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Beware of that developer’s “soon”. I used to love Bear but can’t trust anything important to an app when I have no sense about whether it might or might not disappear or be updated or almost anything else in between over timescales that are complete fantasy.
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Yeah they have taken a lot of time to release the new version. I still love and use base bear though.
I also love Bear and I don’t really understand why people are complaining. The team is rebuilding the app from the ground up and that takes time. People say that an app like Craft moves faster. But does it? I tried their Windows app (that version must be a joke) and if that is the price of a faster release, than I prefer the “slowness” of Bear.
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People are complaining because they keep paying subscription for v1 which is essentially abandonbear 
It has not had a meaningful update in over a year, and bugs persist while the team works on v2 which will be released ‘eventually’. The last minor update was >10 months ago, their focus is on a piece of software which who knows when I might be able to use, what am I paying the subscription for here, actually?
I have also cancelled my subscription just last week, exported everything and moved on. Bear has crashed multiple times both on iOS and Mac during export. As Bear has begun to stagnate, I have started using other apps to fill in the gaps which just led to more friction. In the end, I dumped Bear as working around its limitations became too much, and have settled on Craft and Obsidian (for different use cases). Any quick notes, which Bear was perfect for, I can take in Drafts, and deal with them later.
Obsidian is for more permanent stuff and knowledge work, Craft is for transient notes, work and personal. Craft is not perfect, they move fast and break things, but at least they listen, are reponsive and fix things. There’s some development happening, it does not feel abandoned as Bear.
If and when v2 of Bear is released, it will be mainainted as poorly and as slowly as v1 was, which begs the question of why it’s worth a subscription to begin with. For example, v1 has had a major irritating bug where it will not do a cleanup of storage space on iOS which led to Bear using, at least in my case, over 5-6 GB of storage eventually for less than 1 GB of notes in the cloud. The only fix was to delete the app and set it up again - every couple of weks, on each of the 4 iOS devices I have. This has been reported multiple times to them, along with other bugs and issues, and nobody there cares.
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Fair points. For me it works pretty solid, but in your case I get why you stopped using it.
On average, Craft has shipped an update every 2-3 weeks since it launched, more than two years ago. Updates often (not always) contain enhancements or genuinely new features or fixes to issues users have reported. Craft is far from flawless but it’s software the team developing it obviously care about and work hard on.
Not issuing significant updates for months on end when there are widely reported bugs says something different.
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Same here. I use it for one thing specifically, and it’s nice to know that I can reliably have it synced between macOS and iOS to work on those short things when I’m away from one or the other. Some people, though, get really frustrated with it.
I get the sense, though, that Bear doesn’t want to be like Craft or Obsidian, and I think Craft has big plans for acquisition (I imagine), whereas it seems like Bear is just slowly, reliably doing their work.
But I’m just a consumer, so I don’t know anything beyond what’s on my screen.
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Craft is also $39/month, while Bear is $15/year.
CORRECTION: My mistake - Craft is not $39/month, it’s $60 per year. Thanks to @dario for setting me straight.
Not sure where you got that pricing from but Craft is $60/year and you can also get it in Setapp.
Oh wow! You’re right. I was looking at a totally different app, also called Craft. Thanks for pointing that out!
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I think both apps look for a different kind of consumer. At least at the actual version of Bear. My gf uses craft for her job to help her store everything relevant in a neat view. However, I use Bear because I don’t find myself dealing with clients and structuring a lot of documents, I just take personal notes.
If I ever change from Bear, I would do so to NotePlan. It is similar to bear with a lot more features that I like, for example time blocking.
You do some valid points and I hope someone from the team lingers around the forum so they can improve on what you mention.
Yeah, both are different products geared toward different audiences. However, people make valid points when they explain why they left bear.
Hey! welcome to the community. I’m already using something similar to keep it which is devonthink. Maybe using both will be overkill.
Moved everything from Bear to Apple Notes and cancelled subscription to Bear and have had no change to my workflows. I just use the app for basic notes and thing I want to retain. Nothing advanced. Apple Notes does the job for me.
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I did the same, the thing I find more interesting in Apple Notes is ability to add links with previews, way more convenient to organize web links, add albums from Apple Music with covers, Podcasts and other. Bear 2.0 seems will have a similar feature, but I just tired of waiting and paying. However, I will definitely check the new version, when it releases… in a couple of years
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I was on Bear a few years ago and I really liked it. One thing I missed was a web interface which was listed as “on their roadmap”. It’s still not here, and when I check in from time to time on the forums/web, people cite their glacial development pace numerous times. For me there are better options, but I can see where they’re loyal following comes from. The app is very well done.
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I was a longtime Bear user, but eventually gave up on them because of the glacial pace of development. I don’t have an issue with a developer taking their time to implement new features, but nearly every iOS release would introduce bugs the Bear team should have easily caught and fixed during the iOS beta period so that Bear would work from day one. Instead, those bugs would persist for weeks or even months. They also consistently missed their projected release dates by a wide margin while introducing minor features no one was asking for instead of focusing on the task at hand.
Eventually I jumped ship for a combination of Drafts and Ulysses, and subsequently dumped Ulysses and went all-in on Drafts for anything text-based I’m going to edit or add on to in the future, and DEVONthink for archival purposes, PDFs, etc. Works a treat, and I don’t miss Bear one bit.
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Thanks for sharing your experience. I also use DevonThink for long time archiving purposes while the notes app that is attracting me because of the speed of development, community and features is NotePlan.
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