Evernote acquired by Bending Spoons

They seems to have some setbacks with their new subscriptions model and the new apps.
So it might just be, that the previous Owner saw a good chance to make as much money with the “sinking star”, as they could get…

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In theory, as they’re based in Italy, they have to respect the GDPR so it could actually be a good thing. That’s just the theory though…

What Ian Small has been able to do with Evernote the last few years has been nothing short of miraculous in terms of keeping the company afloat. He got all the apps on one unified code base without major compromises to the integrity of the original product, and any functionality compromises they did make were later re-added in a timely manner.

While I am completely unaware of Bending Spoons as a company, I have to believe that this is something that Ian and the team believe is necessary for the ongoing growth and evolvement of EN as a product going forward.

I’ve been a paying Evernote user for 12 years and am willing to stay onboard to see what changes come and if it continues to fulfill the roles I’ve used it for in my own life.

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Never used Evernote, just curious: did they bring back AppleScript?

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AFAIK, it is still unsupported, but I’ve used the app for so long without using scripting methods that I’m not sure they’re necessary for anything that I do at this point.

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“We envision the perfect solution. Then we build something even better!”

Ummm … ok …

I’m having a bit of a chuckle at all this.

We have the Obsidian folks going “see what happens when you don’t use text files, your notes can belong to someone else!”. Uh, as far as I know they’re my notes and Bending Spoons has yet to announce the policy where they’re deleting my notes. But yeah, your notes are totally safe with those 45 third party plugins you’re rocking to make markdown files look like Trello boards or task managers. That’ll never break #sarcasm.

Then we have the run for the hills folks who don’t take a moment to see what all this means or how it pans out. Just full on, burn the house down panic mode.

And the people who are like “I stopped using it 5 years ago when it wouldn’t let me upload 12GB a month for free” or “one time it lost a file of mine”, an incident that was probably end user error. And EN has note versions, you couldn’t recover it?

Look, I’m not saying EN is perfect or that this acquisition will work out. Maybe it will maybe it won’t. But seeing the mass of people swarm around Evernote like a group of sixth graders around a kid they’re bullying on the playground is a little much for me.

My notes aren’t “trapped” in EN. I’ve exported ENEX files lots of times with success. Also, I don’t exactly view Obsidian as a great place to store a receipt and then make notes on it — especially on their mobile app.

I think EN is great, and while they’ve had some major farts over the past few years, it’s still the best digital filing cab in the biz.

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Well, I’m pretty sure that post won’t provoke many responses. :rofl:

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This thread needed a kick in the butt for a jumpstart :rofl:

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This is not good. While an Evernote acquisition would not be exactly unexpected, the new owner company, for what I know, does not have the experience of running a service like Evernote. The service is expensive to operate and we do not know the number of paying subscribers they have. Have they run out of runway? Or has Bending Spoons better plans to squeeze every last $ from their paying customer base? Who knows. Ian Small has finished what he was hired for: recover what is possible from the initial VC. Mind you, I truly feel like he did a good job, and the technology decisions made sense. I’m kind of bummed that there were no better buyers, but that’s life.

I believe it’s time to jump ship from EN as fast as possible. I am still a paying customer and will remain for as long as the pricing tier remains, but I also exported everything a couple of years ago so I am on the safe side.

I cannot count the times that EN saved my ass since 2009: its full text search, OCR and sync technology was and is still great.

Ohh good reminder i need to cancel my Evernote before it renews in Dec. The macApp is so slow and almost unusable. I started using Evernote around 10 years ago and have it organized pretty well but find myself just using TextEdior instead of Evernote in so many cases since the launch time is so bad. I’ll have to find a decent alternative. I am not a heavy user just want basic organization and the ability to make tables and number rows. Evernote can do the tables but I have to manually number rows.

That is not uncommon. Mobile apps that have been used only once 2019 | Statista

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Of course, I have a lot of Apps like this on my systems, unfortunately.
But this also means, that the fact, that Apps were downloaded a certain number of times, does not mean anything positiv about the quality of those apps.
But I would see it as a negative point, if Apps of a company were downloaded 500Mio. times, but only 18% of those downloads where actually in use, or with other words, 82% of those, who downloaded the app, where not satisfied with the quality of the App or the related service.
This is nothing, a company should run their adds with, in my opinion.

UUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH Huge paying user and defender of EN since 2013. This? This is enough. I’m done and so let the migration begin. :v: out EN.

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While government contracts are no guarantee, that implies that they have experience dealing with lots of data, lots of users and EU-spec medical data security. If they had supplied a USA track and trace system perhaps we would have heard of them!

It may imply that, but it seems that it is in reality not.
The Data collected with the App are stored on Government server, and in fact the App they developed just produce and exchange some randomly generated numbers.
And, as far as I understand, the main part of the covid tracing systems came from Apple/Google anyway.

That has nothing to do with medical data security, large data or a conclusion how they handle the Data User are providing them via EN.
In fact, a company that seems to be solely driven by “fast money”, might be also highly interested in monetarizing the user data they will get, at least if the revenue stuck because the people do not want to spent $20/week for something like EN.

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Mostly agreed. Nothing has changed but decisions are already being made to invest time and energy to move elsewhere. It’s like all the people leaving Twitter because “it’s going to be ruined.” Maybe it will be, and if it is, I’ll leave too. For now, it still works for me like always.

I’m downloading a backup of my Evernote data, in case something weird happens, and then getting back to work. I’ll figure out a new too when and if something changes.

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I normally did that at least once a month in the 11+ years I used EN.

It might be not only a problem, that the data might get lost, but that Evernote has access to the data stored on their server.

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Interesting. I abandoned Evernote years ago. I did recently download the app to see if they had improved it…it seems worse IMO, quite an inelegant implementation of an electron app. Very un-Apple-y.