Five years have passed since I wrote this short post about Simplenote. No great writing app for Android has showed up and so this new post still has a reason to be written.

Back in the good old days when I was still caught in the closed but cozy ecosystem of IOS, I tried and bought lots of writing apps for iPhone and iPad. Before I migrated to Android phone, my main writing app on the iPhone was Ulysses. After having lots of trials and errors with tons of writing apps, I had settled down with Ulysses.

Ulysses is the best writing app I have ever seen for iPhone and iPad. The only exception might be Scrivener for iPhone which I did not try and seems to get rave reviews.

Most writing apps have a problem of organizing notes. You just get a list of notes and therefore you just can’t write a long book that has chapters. Ulysses handles the problem by allowing users to make sub-notes within a note. This sub-note system works flawlessly just like folders in Scrivener for Desktop.

Another strength of Ulysses is that it can export selected notes into various formats such as pub, pdf, txt, and html. While using the app on a daily basis for my blogging, I thought I could really write a decent book with it. I say ‘I could’ because I lacked another ingredient for book writing – a literary talent 🙂

Now, when I bought my new Android phone, Samsung Galaxy Note 8, last October, I started to look for an alternative to Ulysses. The result was less than satisfactory. For Android phones, there simply is no app that can be deemed even slightly similar to Ulysses. I won’t say crappy but most writing apps for Android are lagging behind IOS apps such as Byword, 1Writer and Editorial . Somehow, they don’t seem to be catching up with IOS apps in terms of features and interface designs. The only Android app that had a level of performance and design that is close to those of the above mentioned-apps is JotterPad. But it still lacks the sub-notes system found in Ulysses.

After realizing that even the best Android writing app can’t compete with Ulysses, I changed my criteria for choosing a writing app for Android. I decided to find the most simple app with reliable and fast sync with a writing app on my Mac. What I found – or maybe, I should say, recalled because I used it on my iPhone before – was Simplenote. Simplenote comes from the people who made WordPress. It is a plus because I have been using WordPress for more than fifty of my all blogs for the last ten years and I liked its reliability.

Features of Simplenote are not many but they work great. What I like the best is its super fast sync. Sync between Simplenote and nvALT – my main writing tool on Mac – is phenomenal. Right now, I have both simplenote and nvALT open and writing this post on nvALT. It takes less than five seconds for the words that I type on Mac to be shown on Simplenote.

Additionaly, Simplenote allows me to tag each note, search notes, and export them to as texts. I am happy with them though one more feature would make it better. I am talking about a night mode that makes it easier to write at night in bed.

I still have to say that Simplenote is just a next best thing compared to Ulysses. With its lack of hierarchy among notes that is possible in Ulysses and no export of multiple notes into a single document, Simplenote is good for jotting notes but not powerful enough to write a book.

So, bottom line is this. Android has still no solution for a writing app that syncs with desktop apps that allows you to write a book. However, if you just give up the idea of writing a book and look for a good writing app that syncs with your Mac or Windows writing app, then Simplenote is the one you should get.

P.S.: I am using the combination of Simplenote and nvALT. But you can use other desktop apps for writing and syncing texts between your phone and your computer. Simplenote website has desktop apps for Windows, Mac and Linux.