Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF App Reviews

VERSION
14.7
SCORE
4.7
TOTAL RATINGS
283,591
PRICE
Free

Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF App Description & Overview

What is notability: notes, audio, pdf app? Take your notes beyond paper! Download for free and enjoy the powerful, yet wonderfully simple note-taking experience. You will quickly see why we’re Apple Editor’s Choice!

Notability is as versatile as you. Jot down thoughts, import & annotate textbooks, sync your notes with audio, or sketch your next masterpiece. Whether you’re a student, professional, or hobbyist—you’ll find all the tools you need.

MORE THAN PAPER AND PEN
• Write on a variety of paper templates with customizable spacing and backgrounds.
• Take notes with multi-media tools like pencil, highlighter, text, and audio.
• Mark up textbooks, documents, lecture slides, assignments, or images.
• Clean up calculations with Math Conversion technology.
• Search anything in your notes, including handwriting and imported documents.

HANDWRITE AND SKETCH NATURALLY
• Write with the most lifelike, vector-based digital pencil on the market.
• Ink is fine-tuned for the most responsive, precise writing experience (compatible with Apple Pencil & Logitech Crayon).

STAY ORGANIZED, PAPER-FREE
• All your notes in one place! Always keep notes with you, without the weight, hassle, or paper waste.
• Organize notes with customizable subjects and dividers.

NEVER MISS A THING WITH AUDIO PLAYBACK
• Get more out of your lectures and meetings with audio recording, synced to your notes.
• Tap anywhere (in playback mode) to see your note come to life in real-time.
• Search or copy time-stamped text from Audio Transcripts.

EASILY SHARE IDEAS IN PRESENTATION MODE
• Present ideas full-screen without distracting toolbars.
• Engage an audience with all of Notability's tools including a Laser Pointer.

MULTI-TASK WITH MULTI-NOTE
• Work with two notes side-by-side.
• Drag & Drop handwriting, typed text, and images between notes.

IMPORT, ANNOTATE, AND SHARE
• Import and mark-up PDFs, DOCs, PPTs, images, GIFs, and more.
• Easily create searchable PDFs using built-in Document Scan.
• Full-featured, left-aligned typing with word count and formatting options.

FIND AND SHARE INSPIRATION
• Publish your notes for the world to see in the Notability Gallery.
• Browse notes from the community, search topics, save favorites, and download templates!

---

Download Notability for free on iPad, Mac, and iPhone and enjoy Notability with limited editing and features.

Unlock the premium, unlimited note-taking experience with an annual Notability subscription. Subscribers get:
• Unlimited edits, Audio Transcripts, Auto-Backup support, and iCloud sync.
• MyScript Handwriting Recognition and Math Conversion technology.

---

Subscription auto-renews unless canceled, and will be charged via Apple iTunes account on an annual basis. Prices vary by location. You can manage your subscription in account settings after purchase. Family Sharing is not supported.

For technical assistance reach our team at support@gingerlabs.com. Visit notability.com or connect with us @notabilityapp on social.

Privacy policy: https://notability.com/privacy
Terms of Service: https://notability.com/terms

Notability is a registered trademark of Ginger Labs, Inc.

😍 Do you love Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF app? Please share your friends!

share facebook whatsapp twitter pinterest email telegram
App Name Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF
Category Productivity
Published
Updated 23 January 2024, Tuesday
File Size 325.39 MB

Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF Comments & Reviews 2024

💸 Want to send money abroad for free?

We transfer money over €4 billion every month. We enable individual and business accounts to save 4 million Euros on bank transfer fees. Want to send free money abroad or transfer money abroad for free? Free international money transfer!

Giving up. I've used Notability for years, but have finally given up. Overall, it's a good App, but still lacks a lot of functionality that other note apps have. However, Notability continues to have issues regarding saving notes and working with iCloud. Last week, I lost over 100 notes and all my notebooks (36) have been lost. I have followed all the instructions online to try and recover, but with no luck. I know they are there in iCloud as the Notability app has not changed regarding memory usage. For some reason, those notes and notebooks are lost. Notability has a serious issue of linking with iCloud. So many times my notes had to be downloaded to my iPad every time I opened Notability. Every time before I boarded a plane, I made sure my notes where downloaded. I can't tell you how many times I have download partial notes because I didn't have time to download the remaining before boarding. In the end, Notability blames iCloud, but not another single app that I use linked to iCloud has this problem. So, I'm done with Notability. I HIGHLY recommend that if you do use this app to make sure you backup to another cloud service (Dropbox, Google, etc.). Good App, but I have lost all faith in this App going forward. More importantly, I need the confidence that my note App will function at all times. Notability failed that important test.

Notability is great...but not on iPhone. Writing a review of Notability is hard. On the one hand, I use it every single day on my iPad. I do a lot of reading/research for my job, so Notability has saved me from being buried under an endless pile of paper. I even pair it up with Scanbot so I can quickly scan materials in meetings and then have all my notes/handouts in a single place. Being able to search my handwriting is a game-changer! So is having access to my documents and notes everywhere, including my laptop, and having all changes and edits synced through iCloud. I’ve always wanted to go paperless with ubiquitous access to everything; Notability is my hub for that. Which brings me to my chief complaint about Notability: it’s iPhone app is terrible. It’s nice to see my notes on my phone if I need to skim something quickly on the go, but basic functionality is missing. You can’t search a document, highlight pages, see all the pages in a document—if you’re looking for something, you can only scroll until you find it. That’s ok if you’re talking about two pages of notes; but if you are looking at a 50 page journal article trying to find something, it’s ridiculous. Competitors have this functionality on iPhones, but Notability has never added it. I wish they would! I also wish they would format text-only notes like Google Docs, adjusting text size for a given display without affecting the formatting.

Great for school. I’ve been using this for med school, and it has been fantastic. I’m able to download all professor’s powerpoint presentations to notability and sort them in a pretty simple way. I’m able to search all my notes pretty easily, even for things that I write on the iPad which can come in handy. No real complaints about the app, but I can always ask for recommendations. 1. I wish I could search in one division. For instance, if I am searching a drug that works in a combination like phenytoin, one subject it can be found in is cardiovascular and also neuro. I can search all notes or I can search one ‘subject’, but not a division (one tier higher than subject, a division holds subjects). I do think that the phone app and computer app can be improved to be more on par with the features of the iPad, and I think the sidecar ability can definitely be improved to work a lot better with the computer version of notability. Also, I wish it was possible to be able to organize with 1-2 more tiers. That being said, this app has worked way better than I expected it to for school. I’ve never used goodnotes or onenote, but notability is worth a shot for sure.

Tone deaf UI update, horrible development team, horrible interactions with staff. If you are deciding to download this app or Goodnotes, GET GOODNOTES. A horrible redesign of the app interface was put into place around one month ago—changes that NO ONE ASKED FOR. This updated SEVERELY disrupted the workflow on Notability, so much so that doctors, teachers, med students, college students, etc… completely switched apps and uploaded their notes elsewhere. Check the Notability Reddit page for many first-hand accounts The response from the development team? Hard-headed and childish backlash. So many users have BEGGED the option to CHOOSE between the old UI and new UI design because this is possible on different apps, but the Dev team REFUSES to listen to this criticism and is FORCING users to use this buggy new interface. Many users have already switched to Goodnotes or another competitor. This is the PERFECT example of how to ruin company image and a PERFECT example of incompetent staff who do not care about their customer base. I don’t know where these design and software engineers got their degree?m, but they need to go back to school because what they produced is garbage!!!!! Hiring managers and HE from ginger labs need to review the stubborn engineers/staff who keep deleting posts and giving sass on the Notability Reddit and fire these incompetent workers and never hire similar ones again.

Almost perfect. This app is almost perfect. From the beginning I downloaded both GoodNotes and notability to try both. I can honestly say I can hardly use GoodNotes now, because I can do so much more here I one place. If I could suggest a couple of things that may make this program a little better for a student. First , It would be great if you could choose a folder from the drive or photos(of slides)and then pop the entire file IN the document I’m writing on and it default to a page size image - as doing them one by one , then having to size each one is a real pain when I have a bunch to add. One thing GoodNotes / books does well. Or at least if I could choose more than one image from my note to drag in ...OR not have to click back into the photo options button after each one as its a real pain if I want to import several pages and to a note in a hurry. I would love to have the option to read and turn my pages horizontally like a book and have a book folder file to confine or open it easily - like GoodNotes. Besides these two things - it seems perfect. Its a great well thought out program that keeps progressing with so many great options. Good job to the developers

New Mac App is not good. I’ve been using Notability for the past few years and love it. Being able to upload PPT and PDF decks for meetings and then take notes on my ipad has been a game changer for productivity. I can review documents - mark them up - and then send the notes directly back to my team. Except for a (very) slight delay sometimes between my Mac and my ipad, everything was seamless. I recommended Notability to everyone. However, the latest release of Notability for Mac is a disaster. It crashes often. When it isn’t crashing it’s nearly impossible to use. Trying to drag notes from one folder to another is incredibly frustrating - difficult to accomplish and takes a ton of time to get it to work. Often I can’t seem to drag and drop except on the fourth or fifth try. Imagine if your mouse pointer only worked about 25% of the time. Also - I used to be able to “print to Notability” directly from PPT (incredibly useful for quick uploads) and that feature is gone. And uploading a folder from Finder by dragging it over to Notability is frustrating - super laggy, often results in the “spinning wheel of death”, or just crashes the app. I would go back to the previous version is a hot second if I could. It’s so annoying that I’ve even considered moving to a different notes system - although I really don’t want to do that. I love Notabilty and the ipad version works great. But I need my full Notability ecosystem to work well together. Like it used to.

the worst customer support. I love this app, it is definitely the best for note taking on a tablet out there. However, I had a performance issue last year and I tried to contact support and no one ever got back to me. I’ve had similar issues and didn’t bother reaching out because I knew it would be futile. In my opinion, a product can be mediocre, but if it has great customer service, that sets it apart. Notability is the opposite. The product is great (in theory), but whenever there are issues, there is no support. This app is constantly glitching, between the handwriting jumping around the page randomly, not allowing me to close out of the right side menu that allows you to search in the document, or the most annoying bug where a note scrolls to the bottom of a page and will not let you go back to the top until you close out of the app. Currently, I am having an issue where I have two notes open at once (one is a pdf of my textbook, and one is the notes I am taking from it), and there are numerous problems, including those I just mentioned, as well as tools not working as I am trying to go back and forth writing on both documents. This is the best notetaking app I’ve tried, but the constant bugs are extremely frustrating when this is the main mode I use to read textbooks, take notes, and get homework done.

Love the app! — BUT THE CRASHING WHILE TYPING NEEDS TO BE FIXED!!. I’ve been using this app for a couple of years now and I absolutely love it! It keeps me so organized with the templates, the color coordination I can use while making my notes, and the subjects/dividers on the side panel. However, for the past few weeks I’ve been experiencing problems while typing. Whenever I finish typing in a textbox or just in general, I’ll click the button on my on-screen iPad keyboard to close my keyboard but my Notability freezes. The only way I can continue using the app is by exiting out of it and then opening it back up. Sometimes when I do that, not all of the work that I typed out will save before the app crashes. I’ve also tried to close/exit out of my keyboard using other methods, such as clicking on the lasso scissor tool (which always worked for me before I started to have these issues). However, even with using other methods, such as that, the same problem keeps reoccurring. All of this does make work a little harder to get done and I do know that some people are having similar problems. Again this app is totally amazing (and it’s one of my favorites) but please, please, please fix the typing and crashing issue!

New Format Is Worse. I’ve used Notability since 2016, and while some of the smaller updates since then have been wonderful (like being able to add new colors, slight format changes, etc.), this totally new format is less easy to use. It’s not just about having to relearn a few things - that was expected - but the functionality is less intuitive and makes it more work to do simple things. Before, I used to be able to easily press the little button on the bottom right corner for the zoom-in feature, now I have to go to the top right within a note to see settings, THEN press the zoom feature, every time? I know there’s another setting to be able to press and hold for it to come up, but it doesn’t work super well, and again -> less intuitive to figure out, especially for new users. Also, when zoomed in, it takes more work to change colors, utensils, undo, redo, etc. when the bar for those features is not automatically brought closer to the zoom-in section the way it used to be. I don’t understand why these updates were made when it makes every little thing take so much longer to write, draw, and edit by hand. The only thing that doesn’t take longer is typing, but there’s plenty of apps that can do that — the reason I chose to use Notability in the first place was to be able to hand write/draw over things quickly, which was working great…until this new format.

Could add more features !!!!! Please !!!!!!!. I wanted to type my notes using the Cornell method (where there’s a line about 1/4 from the left to separate keywords and body text/notes). I went to check out the different types of papers but realized there aren’t that many templates. I normally use the dotted one to write out my notes, so drawing that 1/4 line is no big deal. But I wanted to work faster and now type it out. I could always just draw the line but then when I type, the words would just go over the drawn-on line. Using types boxes would be a hassle since it was constantly redshift. I wished there were more templates around it. Also, I wanted to type out something on the center of my page but am having a difficult time trying to center my text. I looked up a way to center my text and found that if I hold down on my toolbar, more functions show up…..but it doesn’t let me use them?? I try clicking on it but it never works. It just says drag items to the edit toolbar, but even when I move the centering tool to the front, it just automatically goes back to its original position. I’m not sure if what I’m using is correct, I just wanted to center my text but it doesn’t seem to be working.

Best Invention Ever - Student Perspective. I’m a computer science student graduating in August 2020. Notability has been incredibly helpful as a work tool for school. I bought myself an iPad as a freshman in university. I also bought Notability to take notes. Not having to worry about carrying notebooks and losing papers has been an enormous help. All my notes are taken and saved in notability. I have an entire 4 years of university on this app. The synchronized recording with pen note taking has been the single most helpful thing for me. In some of my toughest computer science courses I would record the lecture (with audio built in on the Notability app) and when I was confused (because I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the lecture) I would go back and listen to the audio and know exactly where the confusion occurred because the writing was synchronized with the location in the audio. I’ve tried multiple note-taking apps (paid ones too) and this is by far my favorite. Thank you Notability team! One thing I would appreciate is a better file management system. Having four years worth of work on my notability app makes file management essential and the current file management could be improved!

Best Notetaking App I found. I’ve been using this app for years, and appreciate all the updates that have occurred since then. This app has sufficed all my note taking needs, in and out of the classroom. One feature I would like to see is the ability to rename recordings, and possibly to attach these recordings to individual pages. One thing I’ve tried doing this semester is have the recording function on while at a lecture, but having numerous recordings in a file that grows daily is difficult with the current set up. If you don’t remember the time stamp or recording number for a particular point, you have to guess and listen for a bit to see if it’s right. It’s either that, or guess based on the date the notes were recorded. If you could at least rename the audio files, the app would be more useful. It would also be nice if you could change the paper style of individual pages, as well as a feature that easily allows you to draw geometric shapes (adding a figure on top of a graph sticky or any other element get tricky when you click on the wrong one. Sometimes because of that, the graph background ends up on top, and the figure behind it, rendering it useless). There aren’t really any visible bugs with this version of the app, Would recommend for someone looking for a suitable note taking app, whether it’s handwritten or type. I think the addition of a few features would make it better.

Not sure what the hype is all about... So, here’s the thing. There are a lot of note taking apps on the market. I feel like if you want a quality one, maybe you need to pay for it. So, I purchased this one and Good Notes. I’ve used Evernote and Microsoft OneNote as well. Nothing sets this apart from competitors besides the price. And please beware: that price for the iOS app does not include the desktop app. That’s a separate charge. You can’t access it through a browser either. That’s a huge negative in my opinion. Additionally, sometimes this app will crash (like during iOS updates) and you’ll lose your subjects and dividers. So, there’s a way to get your subjects back, but you’re out of luck with your dividers. What does this mean? It means that all of the classes you’ve set up for multiple semesters will be wiped out. Whatever was organized under is able to be obtained, but you have to go back through and sort all of it. Do you know what an incredibly awful and tedious task that is? When you contact their customer service, they’re basically just like “Oh, sorryyyyy yeah we don’t care.” If you’re still reading this, oh hey. One last final note: don’t waste your money. I’ve tried them all and think Microsoft OneNote is really the way to go. It’s free, you get cloud storage, the app on the computer is free, and you get full functionality of program. Recent updates means it does EXACTLY what notability does.

I’m using it! ☝🏾. I love the app it is almost everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m very happy with the usability of it in comparison to other note taking apps. I’m not a fan of the subscription model I would rather pay an obscene price one time instead of having an app potentially affect me in the future. My advice is to throw in a lifetime deal for like $50. People could complain but at least they’d have the option. Two features that I would love to see come to the app is to be able to pin audio to a page visually, with a play button and a slider. I use this app for creating story boards and if I can have audio cue in correlation to my my scene breakdowns; I would make more practical use of the audio player. The second feature that I would like to see, is a lasso tool for images. Or an eraser for images. when I create a scene I want to be able to take a picture of my scenes and props and arrange them within the app. The Apple Pencil support is BEAUTIFUL! It would be nice to get some smudging features and paint for it. I would like the option to highlight over pictures as well so I’m able to simulate lighting on my subjects. GIF’s. This is definitely more than two things 😅 but currently AS IS Notability is a complete product is worthy of its asking price. However I feel that if those few tweaks were added it would be worth even more and it wouldn’t be debated.

Taking two stars off for the new update. Historically, my experience with this app has been excellent, 5 out of 5. I have over 600 individual notes, all of which are multiple pages. This app is also my app of choice for reading and annotating scientific papers. This is all to say, this app has been one of the best things about owning an iPad for me. However, they pushed a recent update (their “new notability” update) that, in my experience, has significantly degraded the quality of the experience. Favorited pen colors and sizes were removed, and they added a pencil for some reason. To be clear, I appreciate some of the new features (additional multi gesture support, the ruler, etc), but they have integrated these new features and existing features into an experience that feels clunky at best to navigate and somehow manages to run slower on an M1 iPad Pro to the point where it lags when accessing the quick note switcher (something I use heavily). One of the best parts of this app was how snappy it was to use, and how out of the way of what you need to get done the interface was. That is the big downgrade of this update; the interface now gets in my way of using this app to get what I need to do done. Notability team- I know you have people reading the reviews of your app. Take my feedback and make it right- you can have your cake and eat it too if you put some polishing work into it.

Saved My Bacon. I’m currently in grad school and after my first semester, I decided to switch to digital note taking. I was simply overwhelmed by the massive paper trail that often happens in grad school. I shopped around and I saw this app and decided to give it a go. I don’t normally spend $10 on an app, but it has been worth every penny! The organization is top notch, it works with many different type of styli (I use the Friendly Swede interchangeable tip stylus, because of the cost, but Apple Pencil works great if you have an iPad Pro), the recording feature is great, sharing notes is super easy and it’s been so convenient to have all of my school documents in one place. So far, I’m at 600+ documents and I haven’t lost anything since using this app. I absolutely credit this app with helping me pass my comprehensive exams. My only complaints is that I wish I wouldn’t have to buy it again for Mac. I also would like it if they were to incorporate tabs, so I wouldn’t have to back out to the menu every time I wanted to switch between a few related notes. In spite of these shortcomings, I still give it five stars because of how much it’s helped up my game as a grad student. Thanks, Notability!

Not as great as I thought it would be. Many issues that I don’t like. The microphone function has a lot of potential but ultimately the only thing I can hear after recording in large lecture rooms are staticky background noises and the tapping of my pencil when I’m writing. The left handed mode doesn’t make much sense to me. I’m used to functions being on the top and now functions are on the bottom and don’t actually help with being left handed. There’s also A LOT of skipping that occurs which is incredibly annoying and there are times when I will be writing a letter but it is automatically changed to a shape. When I try press the back function to erase the shape, letters written before the shape are erased so I have to use the actual eraser. In instances like that, it would be nice to have a forward function because somethings are accidentally erased but now I have to completely rewrite it. The font size for pencil and higher are completely out of wack. I tend to write pretty hard so the writing gets very thick even though I have it on a thin setting and the examples of the thickness aren’t very representative. I also wish we had more control over the colors we prefer. All default colors are first which I only use black and it comes with a bunch of colors I don’t like but can’t delete them or change them to colors I’d prefer. I came from GoodNotes and I’m very use to their functions which might be the issue but since I paid for notability I actually want to use it.

I LOVE version 14! Keep up the great work Ginger Labs!. Every change that was made for versions 14 clearly has a distinct and effective purpose and execution. I just have 1 suggestion. When I read about version 14 having individual presets I thought it meant that you could have individual “profiles” of tools that you could switch between, but it means that each tool has its own set of size/color combinations that you can save, which is definitely a welcome change. However, I’d love to see this taken one step further where you can save different “profiles.” For example, sometimes I take what I like to call “chalkboard” notes which is just a black background and using white and neon colors, but when I’m not using a black background I rarely if ever use a white or bright color, so it would be amazing if I could save different sets of colors and other tool settings as their own preset and switch between them on the fly, or better yet, allow me to set a profile of colors for a given notebook, so I can have black on white assigned to a given notebook and have white on black for another notebook. Just an idea, I’m incredibly impressed and satisfied with version 14 and I’m very excited to see what Ginger Labs comes up with next! Keep it up guys!

Notes, Nickels, and Dimes. I use this app for all my schoolwork. Its ability to have to notes open at a time has been essential. I have been able to have power point slides open on one half of my screen and my notes on the other, and then easily copy and paste diagrams from power points into my notes. Another amazing feature is the ability to search your own handwriting. This has made it considerably easier to search for a specific topic, when my notes become many pages long. The only downside to this app is its lack of organization. You can only create one layer of folders. Meaning instead of being able to have sub folders for each of my classes such as exams, quizzes, homework, notes, etc. I am only able to divide my content by semester and class. I really hope they add the ability to create sub folders to help with organization. Because have 30+ notes for one subject isn’t very efficient. My other big complaint is with the pricing changes. I liked how you could buy a single sticker pack or a technology piece, and you only had to pay once. However now, you have to subscribe and a pay a yearly fee to access these features. Build the cost of these features into the app, and please take away the subscription, or allow people to buy things at a slightly higher rate… but without need to pay a regular fee.

Great, one major flaw. I love what I can accomplish in this app without paying for a subscription, and use it regularly (more on that below). BUT it regularly drops and re-downloads ALL my notes, even whichever one I’ve left open for editing, which costs me both time (waiting instead of working) and data/money (my internet is pre-paid by the Gb). I’ve asked twice and been told both times that it’s probably because I don’t have much free storage on my iPad. I have four or five Gb free, and Notability is one of the main apps I use on here, so I really feel it should have an option to never erase notes unless I have deleted them. If the storage gets full, yes, I’ll have to deal with it, but I’d rather cross that bridge in other ways than re-downloading all my Notability notes multiple times a month. On the plus side, some of the great uses I’ve found: for handwriting notes around pasted-in scriptures during sermons, for pasting in passages in a language I’m learning and practicing my handwriting, for reading & marking up PDFs of academic documents for class, and for marking speaking tests using a rubric - I can import the rubric PDF filled with names for an entire class and then export it back to Drive as a new PDF with all my marks, saving me printing the several-page document week after week.

Disappointed after new update. There was a new update recently and the look/layout looks pretty different. What disappointed me was that I’ve found more glitches while taking notes, using my apple pencil, or using my apple keyboard. I’ve had this app for nearly 3 years now for all my college course notes and haven’t encountered glitches like this before which is sad. I keep having to exit out of the app and reload it for the simplest things like converting my handwriting to text because the screen completely freezes and won’t let me do anything anymore. This also happens when I try to pop up the keyboard sometimes to type on my notes/documents. I hope there’s another update soon fixing these issues because I truly prefer this platform over any other note taking app. Also in this update, I think the “favorite pens/highlighters” section disappeared? It used to be a moveable bar anywhere on my page which I really loved because it was convenient, but now it’s not and I’m unsure how to get it back. Have to do more work to find my colors/pen sizes and switch between them now. I do like that there are more color options now for subject titles! But please update again soon for the bug fixes :)

A great note taking app for school but the Bugs are becoming annoying. This app could probably be the best note taking app for students just because of the recording feature. The tools up top are fine but they are missing so much compared to GoodNotes. Most of the size for the Pen are useless. After the 4th or 5th size the strokes become way too big for any practical purpose. Same thing with the highlighter except it the opposite. The varying sizes for the erasers is great though because I can basically erase pixels or entire sentences if needed. The cut and paste tool will not select small strokes or words for whatever reason, so sometimes I’m forced to erase and redraw or write. Other than that its works great. Seriously the only tool carrying this app is the Recording feature, GoodNotes has them beat in every other department. (I never mentioned the lack of templates). If GoodNotes has that feature I would go back to GoodNotes immediately, but they don’t so I stay with Notability. Now the bugs are getting annoying. I cant go a 1 minute without my lines not drawing or the app freezing or the zoom in feature freezing the app. Also the random shapes I get when writing sometimes that I cant delete with the back button and for some reason can only be removed by the eraser. Idk maybe these bugs will eventually send me back to GoodNotes and lectures will have to be recorded the hard way.

Great for note taking and organization, but…. I really do love this app. It’s very easy to use, the gallery has endless formatting options, it’s easy to keep your stuff organized, and the pen/ pencil/ highlighter color options are great. I currently use this app for PA school and love it. I do have a few critiques, but none that would make me not want to use it anymore: 1. I wish there were more options for embedded folders. For example, you can create a divider that contains multiple subjects, but there is no way to further organize the dividers. I would love to be able to have a folder that says “Fall semester” with different dividers for each class, with each divider containing multiple subject folders. 2. In the latest update, they changed the page count on the bottom right corner to disappear when youre in 50/50 split-screen view, and I have to say this is what drove me to write a review. When I’m studying I like to constantly know how many PowerPoint slides/ pages I have left, and I am often in the split screen view to read on one side and write notes on the other. Please please please change it back so that you can have page count in the split screen view in the 50/50 view. There is plenty of room on the page to have that !

Do not buy - Orwellian Doublespeak. So Notability is now “free” but you’ll have to buy a subscription to continue to enjoy the basic features (cloud storage, unlimited editing of your notes) previously included in your purchase. Oh, and they didn’t opt for this subscription model to maximize profit but to give more people access to this hobbled trial version. As if they couldn’t offer a hobbled trial version without moving to a subscription model. Come on Colin Gilboy. This pretense that it’s now free is insulting. I’ve used and recommended Notability practically since it’s inception. And I’m an educator who won’t be personally impacted by this move, at least until you decide students and educators can be squeezed along with the rest of your users. But no more. I will never again recommend Notability to my students or colleagues. Instead, I will go out of my way to tell anyone and everyone AVOID BUYING ANYTHING FROM GINGER LABS. What get’s me heated is not the change in model but the pretense that you’re making the app “free” when in fact you’re eliminating (setting an expiration date on) functionality for which I’ve already paid. If you need a subscription model to adapt/grow, then own up to it. Don’t insult your customers by pretending you’re not doing what you’re obviously doing. There’s nothing “free” about charging customers a monthly fee to retain functionality they’ve already purchased.

Solid, but could easily be better. The app is solid, as everyone else has already pointed out. The thing is, it could easily be better for those that like tiered organization. If you’re using a divider for a subject, you can’t use dividers within that subject. Dividers are meant to /divide/. The app describes a “divider” as “dividers group subjects,” which is literally not the definition of dividing. GoodNotes’ organization system is bounds better, but this one has a few features that make me stay with it. It would be perfect if they just added additional organization levels, but it’s a real hinderance for the schooling that I do between my engineering major and sociology minor. Update: I moved to Apple during my internship 2 years ago. For school, I try limiting everything to just my iPad and MacBook. I even get digital copies of my textbooks. I used Notability and GoodNotes to try testing which was better. They each had their pros and cons. What ended up nudging me to GoodNotes was how engaged they were with their forums and feature requests. I forgot what Notability didn't have, but it was a big thing people had been requesting for literal years. In their feature request forums, there was absolutely no engagement from the devs. I knew they were only making this product for money. Now they're going subscription based? Especially with lack of interest for customer input? Lame.

July 2023 update. I have just been working with the recent update to Notability. I’m so disappointed in these changes. First of all, the previous way to create a customized set of tools was far superior. It took up less space and it was much easier to access the exact tools that I wanted. Now, I’m forced to use the main toolbar, which requires additional steps, and it takes up much more real estate on the note when placed on the side of the screen (my preference w the previous mini toolbar). The second change that has really hampered the way I use Notability is the removal of the undo and the pen tools buttons within the zoom box. Before, I could write at the bottom of my screen, and the tools that I needed were within easy reach. Now the undo button is only at the top of the screen, and the pen/erase tools are now only in the main toolbar. this might seem like a ridiculous complaint, given how the iPad screen is not that big, but as a person with a disability, the less reaching I have to do, the better. Notability was almost perfect in my eyes. They were a few changes I would’ve loved to see. Unfortunately, this update changes the some of things that I find most useful. is there a way to install the previous version? Hopefully there will be some new updates that restore some functionality.

My Most Used App Ever. I have used this app for over 3 years at the time I wrote this review. I used it everyday and have nearly 1000 separate articles and notes within it. I am at the end of my doctorate and have found that I nearly live out of my iPad and mostly this app. I average between 4-6 hours a day in the app. I have helped many people to come to use this app in their daily lives. I prepare my lectures, classwork, attendance, and nearly anything else I would otherwise put on paper all through Notability. If you have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, then Notability is a great contributor to success. I want to help the makers of Notability for the development and a continued improvement of this wonderful app that I bought the yearly subscription and I don’t even use the stuff in it. That is not because the stuff in there is not good, rather it is well made, I am just stuck in my ways of how I use the app. Lastly, I would like to thank the developers of Notability, as I am so grateful for their hard work and intuitive improvements. Keep up the great work and I will continue to use this app al long as iOS supports it. ***April 2023 update*** This app is still the best app I’ve ever used. I’ve got so many people to use it, and I use it every day. It is the most useful iPad app ever! I plan on continuing to use it, and definitely, and I am amazed by how many awesome updates and things that keep adding to it, great job Notability! Keeping innovating!!!

Overall, A Really great app. Something that I really liked about notability was the simple and intuitive layout. This made it really easy for me to organize my notes and help me maintain order with my notes. Another thing that I really liked was all of the new updates that really helped with making things run more smoothly (i.e. the favorites bar, being able to search for key words within the notes themselves instead of just the title, and the magnifying glass). Some areas of improvement would be being able to adjust the shape of the magnifying box because there are sometimes when I’m trying to edit a specific place and the magnifying box just doesn’t fit right. Another thing would be to be able to open more than two notes at once. This would come in handy for those to do notes simultaneously on multiple sections. It would also be cool if when your in portrait mode for the notes you have the option to be able to stack the notes top of one another instead of seeing them side. Then one last area of adjustment would be to be able to have a bookmarked notes bar like how there is a bookmarked pages (within each notes) bar. It would make jumping between two desired note documents a little bit easier. Anyways, that’s it from me. Thank you for making a really great app. Totally looking foreword to what’s in store for the future of this app.

Amazing apps, needs better organization. I have been using Notability for more than 2 years and it is my absolute favorite note-taking app out there. It got me through Highschool and now university, and the voice-recording feature has saved me countless times. The ability to save favorite pens and highlighters has also made it incredibly easy to take colorful and neat notes, which I really appreciate. My only problem with the app is organization. I have around 715 notes and it is getting extremely hard to navigate through them. The inability to have folders within folders has made it incredibly hard to organize my notes in a way that makes sense to me and allows me to find them easily. Each of my classes, for example, has exams, labs, homework, textbooks, and other important documents. Scrolling through 50 notes per subject has become very tiring, and I believe it will only get worse with time. Right now, I change the name of the note to make them easier to find, but an organization feature will make this app complete for me. I’ve downloaded another note-taking app purely for its organization but greatly prefer Notability’s layout, so I hope they implement better folder management soon.

This app could be the crème de la crème, if only…. This app has almost everything anyone who is going to school could ask for, except one very vital thing, that I know for me makes this app a total nightmare to use. This app is great for grabbing PDF file imports and webpage imports for references, which I need lots and lots for my masters program that I am in. However, the organization of this app is a logistical nightmare! Trying to separate the pages is difficult since they all seem to download into the “new” directory, and then once you locate them, putting them in any orderly fashion is nearly impossible. Why haven’t you, with such a wonderful app, been able how to figure out how to add notebooks and folders? Notebooks for the class subjects, so we could create a folder called something like “625 BUS Ethical Business Practice” and then have file folders within the notebooks to put out PDF files that we need for our weekly research papers, and then have them accumulated for reference if we wanted to use them for our final 10-15 page papers, without having to try and sort through all of the pdf files that have been downloaded again. Because the organization of files is so difficult to do, and working full time and school, I don’t have time to try and force this program to work the I want it to work.

Inconvenient Update. App has been great for the past couple years. I use it for school, work, and personal life. Unfortunately this last update isn’t the best. It feels like they put more focus on aesthetics instead of functionality this time. Most of the options now require the user to go through a few extra clicks to get what you want (having ADHD, this slows me down at times bc it breaks my focus longer) but it's workable so that's fine. My biggest issue lies with their choice to remove the outlining white space. Not only does the page itself partially block my ipad's own info (date, time, battery life, etc.) now all the tool bars sit directly in the writing space with no way to move or hide them. So if you're writing at the top or already have stuff there it's partially blocked on both sides by the buttons. The same applies on zoom mode. For some reason the button to move lines is WITHIN the writing box. There also is no second undo/redo button closer to the writing box, so you have to reach to the top of the page each time if you don't wanna constantly switch between write and erase. The update is incredibly cute but please fix this or at least give us the option to toggle this type of view on and off.

Perfect For Students. This app is my go to app for anything I do in school. It has made taking notes fun and easy. And now after using this app for a little over a year and a half, I can absolutely say that this is my favorite note taking app. Practically everything that I do for school is on this app, which when paired to my phone makes it a breeze to quickly scroll through my notes at any time. The writing feels fluid with great options for size and colors. Importing files and documents is extremely easy and fast. On tops of this, the line straitening and shape recognition is amazingly useful and easy, without being intrusive or correcting things that were not meant to be corrected. My one issue I have is with organization. Especially towards the end of the year when I have hundreds of notes and files, they can often be lost in the clutter. I have found ways around this by specifically labeling my files so all of my notes, quizzes, tests, and handouts are all sorted by category alphabetically, but I wish there was a way to put folders inside of subjects. This app is my favorite, but to make it the best it really needs a better way to organize files inside of subjects. Again, I cant imagine creating folders inside of subjects would be hard do and I really hope they include this soon in an update.

Needs more organizational ability. I have seen several other complaints about notability needing better organization, so it is upsetting knowing that nothing has been done to address this issue. There needs to be some kind of additional their of organization that allows you to either 1) put the dividers into a folder. For instance, all my dividers have a bunch of subjects in them, and when i am done with this semester, I would like to be able to put those dividers into one large folder that says “fall 2020.” Or, 2) you could keep the dividers/subjects, but add another teir underneath subjects where you could subdivide specific lessons. All in all, the divider and subjects organization that is in place is too simplistic. I cannot recommend this app to someone who is doing most (potentially all) their school work on it. It just doesn’t have enough organization. Another issue is when you go to send a file to notability, it brings up a ton of subjects, all the subjects you have ever created. If you are using the subjects tab for weekly modules like I do, it gets very annoying to find the correct subject as I have around 50 (and i have only been using it for one semester). This app is nice to take notes in, but not long term. It has worked well for a single semester, but I do not know how I will be able to continue adding files with such a simplistic organization style.

New update is horrible… so horrible that I am considering going to Goodnotes. I have been an avid notability user for many years now. It has gotten me through all of high school and my first year of college. However, my notability has just updated and I hate being on this app now. WHY did you feel the need to delete favorites bar?!?! It was easy AND convenient. Now I have to search through all of the colors and pen sizes to get the perfect pen. Not only that but the new pencil you added is DISGUSTINGGG. I get people wanna sketch but come on… this is notability. People use this app for school work. Trust me when I say, no one wanted a pencil feature. Another feature that I loved that is gone, is the zoom mode button. Before, it was so easily accessible. I could just press a button and boom zoom mode activated. Now I have to go through A BILLION steps to activate it and then ANOTHER billion steps to turn it off. It’s just so wild to me how Notability creators can take such a beautiful app and turn it into something so god d*** ugly. The new font is really ugly too. Never would I imagine myself writing a one star review for my used-to-be favorite app. Notability creators, I beg you please go back to the old notability. This new update is not usable anymore and I am so upset. It breaks my heart that I have to transfer to goodnotes. Notability, I can’t believe you. One star for me.

PUT ZOOM VIEW BACK ON THE PAGE PLEASE GOD. I’ve had this app for 6 years. I had to switch accounts a little over a year ago and now I have pay an additional 15 a year? Would be more accepting of the price increase if the app wasn’t getting objectively worse in the meantime. Thinking about switching to GoodNotes and if that doesn’t work I guess I’m going back to paper. This is borderline unusable. Most updates this app has undergone since I started using it have made it worse in one way or another but this last one is just kind of ridiculous. The new layout is awful, the interface is unrecognizable, the floating tool bar is a pain, all the useful features have been moved around or hidden to make way for a selection of significantly less relevant new ones. It all feels like change for the sake of change without real consideration for utility, and the app has been glitching constantly since. Genuinely pretty sad about it and really hoping at least a couple of the changes are reversed. Please don’t waste your money on it. And if anyone at corporate ever reads this- please, please, please take zoom view back out of settings. Or at least make adding it to the toolbar an option. It is such an unbelievable pain to have to go through multiple steps to get to it every time I want to write. Especially because you have to exit zoom to copy/paste, move things around, etc. It makes such a big difference to just have it out there on the screen.

Great app, but does have some flaws. Flaws - It is hard to toggle between pen and eraser. The interface isn't as aesthetically pleasing as good notes. It is very hard to add a different page that isn’t the same template as previous pages. The palm rejection is bad. Even if you put on palm rejection it’s still bad and glitches a bunch. Greatness - But through all of that, the app is great. You can record lectures and play them back. There are infinitely more template and page options. And there is a special “social media”, basically a gallery where people can create calendars and fancy note sheets for you to use for free! The reason why I did “social media” is because you can like it and post your own custom page templates. The two tap for undo works much better than good notes, but I turn it off so that it doesn’t randomly undo stuff due to the bad palm rejection. There are more brushes, like dotted and dashed brushes. THE SHAPE MAKER IS BETTER! So you create perfect circles instead of an ellipse or a square. You can also get polygons for those weird boxed. I’m sure there are more things that are great about this app that I may have missed, so please buy it! But if you are more for the aesthetics rather than a student and wanting those good grades, get the other apps! But if you are a student and are okay with a less aesthetically pleasing interface, (but still great templates and note pages!), get this!

A staple, but disappointing. Update: I have used this app for YEARS now through high school, college, and now medical school. I love the app and appreciate it to no ends. However, one ongoing issue I have noticed is its unreliability with downloading ppt files to PDF within the app from Canvas. I don’t know if it’s a problem with communication with canvas or just a general issue with converting to pdf within the app, but it’s annoying to have to convert all my lecture notes to pdf on my MacBook then transfer them to my iPad. It’s so unreliable I don’t think I can use only my iPad anymore, which is what my goal was. Anyway, long story short: I love this app, but it’s been frustrating for about the past year or two. The new update added better pencil integration, ,earning now it has actual pressure sensitivity rather than just the way they did it before which was through speed sensitivity determining the weight of the line drawn. This combined with the other amazing aspects of this app that I have always enjoyed make this my favorite app ever. I use it in college to take notes and annotate presentations during lecture as well as at work for taking notes during meetings or as a work log. It is simply an amazing app, well worth the money, and I look forward to continue using it with my iPad Pro through medical school. Thank you ginger labs!!!

Great university study tool with a couple issues. I was using OneNote on a Surface tablet until the digitizer stopped working. I decided to try using an iPad Pro instead, since they’re lighter. Notability was the only app to offer most of the same functionality as OneNote on a Windows tablet. There are many things that I prefer about Notability, but there are a few issues that prevent me from giving it more stars: first, I would like the ability to create a group of commonly used highlighters/pens for marking up documents. I have a system of using certain colors to represent certain things, and I would like to be able to organize all those highlighters and pens into a group where I determine the order and placement. If that is possible in Notability, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Secondly, I use Notability in a setting where I’m regularly working with several languages (including RTL - Right to Left languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic). Notability does not have good support for combining multiple languages in one document at this time, especially not mixed English-Hebrew or English-Aramaic. Please give Notability the ability to recognize and format RTL languages. I can do that natively on most Apple apps, and many 3rd party apps, so the inability to do that on Notability really sticks out. Please improve these issues, and I will gladly give it a 5 star rating. In fact, if those two issues are fixed, I won’t even miss using OneNote for most of my coursework.

Have loved this app for years, and then…. I will start by saying notability has been an amazing note-taking app for me. I purchased notability for iOS and macOS. Two separate purchases. The reason for the one star review though is the planned change in their pricing structure. Giger labs has determined it best to transition to a subscription model. I don’t mind this on it’s own. Where I take issue is that they are legit removing features such as iCloud sync, hand-writing detection, and math from the upcoming “free version”. These are not new features- but instead features that were added in previously to those who paid for the app, essentially crippling our versions and “stealing” our money. Ginger labs are going about this transition all wrong. If they want a better model, look at fantastical. They too transitioned to a subscription, but when they did, all the features added up to that point still accessible to those who previously paid for the app. I strongly believe that Ginger Lab’s plan to lock away features previously provided to those who paid for the app amounts to theft, and unless this policy is changed, I suggest everyone who bought this app files a complaint with the BBB, Apple, and their State’s attorney General. For those that have paid for this app, please do not update to subscription until they change course. Goodnotes is also a wonderful not taking app, and even Apple notes has become pretty darn good.

A real app for work. I need to produce about 1000 well-organized words for my editor each week. When I am at home, I can use my iMac. But we travel much of the year. During the time on the road I rely on Notability. Although I have an older iPad and can't use the split screen, I can take advantage of Notabilities Web clips that can be lined up nicely along one side of the paper I am working on...keeping my notes easily available. Better yet, Notability handles the complex notes like a champ...no slowdown in typing, etc. The app is also aces in with a first-rate filing system...I do many versions before I get my 1000 and I can keep the versions together by putting them in the week's subject. I have been using Notability since it came out and find that it has gotten better with each new version. My hard-earned pennies were well-invested in this app. My desiderata: word count and the ability to add space to the lines...It's easier to edit when text is double-spaced. I could use Pages which has both of these but I like how Notability feels as I write....the text comes out smoothly; Pages doesn't have web clipping or the nice filing system. There are LOTS of note taking apps but I find Notability to be really great....I actually can get stuff done with it. Ok, here’s a suggestion. I would like to be able to popup a notability note while I am in another app—

Needs better organization. This app is very helpful, especially the feature to record lectures. I can stay on top of what my professor says easier, and use the Apple Pencil to highlight or emphasize certain points. There is a bit of a delay for the notes and the audio, so when I click on a note, I know to automatically hit the “rewind 10 seconds” button, but I just deal with it because it is so helpful regardless. However, while the recording ability is the star feature of this app, the other features need improvement. 1. Since more classes are taking place online due to the pandemic, there should be an option to record lectures using the iPad’s internal microphone. Right now, I play the lectures on my phone and record audio with the iPad, since I do not have a better option. 2. Second, and my biggest gripe with the app is ORGANIZATION. Although you can have subjects, and place notes in the subjects, I want the ability to make folders within the subjects. A lot of my subjects in school are so complex - with labs and assignments in addition to lecture notes and different subtopics, the ability to make folders within subjects is seriously ESSENTIAL. The most I can do is change the name at the beginning of the file to reflect what kind of material it is (ex: Lab 1, Assignemnt 2, etc.) but the ability to make folders really holds this app behind. I still use it for the recording feature, but the lack of organizational options available is really frustrating.

Great app. I absolutely love this app. Between work, school, and life, this app helps with notes, and my planners for everything. It’s so much more convenient to carry my iPad around rather than a bunch of books. This app is very user friendly, making it very easy to take notes and convert from the pen to highlighter, etc. You can even search your own handwriting and text from a pdf that has been uploaded in the same file which makes it easy to go back and look for something specific instantly rather than scroll through pages of notes. Great app!!! Update: I recently tried to access my notes on my iPhone, but half of the files wouldn’t sync between the ipad and my phone, which was annoying. I had down time to study and couldn’t because they wouldn’t sync. The only way to fix was to duplicate the file on the ipad so it would sync to my phone. It wasn’t a huge deal for that day, but could potentially be a major issue down the line if you don’t have the original device you used for the notes. Other than that, I still think it’s a great app and recommend it to anyone who is switching to digital notes and who doesn’t want to carry around a bunch of binders/notebooks!

I’ve never had this issue before. I’ve been using Notability for about 7 years now. As a student, it is important to make sure you don’t miss any information and sometimes that can be difficult if the professor goes too fast. One tool that I started using about 3 years ago was the microphone to record lectures. I loved it because I could follow along with what the professor was saying and what I wrote as well. Right now I’m really upset with Notability because of a bug. Recently I’ve been having problems when I completely close out of the app. Not only are my recordings getting deleted, but so are my notes!!! That’s a major problem that needs to be fixed immediately. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find an app quite like notability, so I will have to stick with good old fashioned pen and paper until this problem is resolved. I’ve also been having problems with the other tools. I usually have no problem with changing colors, font sizes, or anything related to that nature but I can’t even do that anymore! This isn’t a huge issue as I can still select the right tool, but it’s hard to organize my notes. I also can’t create subjects or dividers anymore which is driving me insane! It’s the beginning of the semester which means I need to be able to organize myself from the start to work efficiently throughout the rest of the semester. I’ve never had any issues with this app before, but these are some major problems that need to be fixed before I continue using it.

Good medicine studying tool. I’ve used notability for my 4 years of medicine, NBME tests, step exams, organization of documents, logbooks, and extracurricular. What I like the most was the option to import any document that needs signing or writing on, and being able to do so. Allowing me as a student to have different documents, ppt, word documents and pdfs in a single place facilitated my studies and work. The iCloud setting for apple devices is another good option to be able to instantly refresh documents to your mac or iPhone. Sometimes it would malfunctioning and would not want to refresh as indicated (ie: documents would not appear on their folder, they would appear under all notes) but it’s not that big of a deal. A handful of times the app crashed and I lost all my documents, it is important to have a backup, even though after that incident I still did not backup. I recommend this app to any student who is starting undergrad and/or postgrad and want to take their education seriously. “A well organized education should not be one which prepares students for a good remuneration alone. It should be one that can help and guide them towards acquiring clear thinking, a fruitful mind, and an elevated spirit.” -Haile Selassie

New Notability is Not Good. Ever since they introduced the “New Notability!” the app has been lagging for me. It’s especially noticeable when I’m trying to write things with my Apple Pencil. It’s really annoying when I’m in a lecture and trying to take notes but I have to concentrate more on making sure I’m actually getting things on the page than on the content of the lecture. I also really really dislike the new toolbar. It is much more time consuming than it used to be to change utensils or even to change the thickness of the utensil to create headings, which is important for me when I’m taking notes. It is also very frustrating that the Undo button can no longer be moved. It is now on the other side of the screen from where I had it, and my muscle memory keeps going to the other side of the page, which again takes time away from what I actually want to be doing. I really like Notability, and I specifically chose it over competitor apps like GoodNotes when I first got my iPad because I felt like I could do more with Notability, but if the lagging continues to be an issue I may have to look elsewhere. I am a student with a learning disability, and time is really of the essence for me. It is not an exaggeration for me to say that every second counts for me, and this updated format has taken way more seconds (and minutes) from me than it should have.

Fix iCloud syncing issues. I love noteability and would give 5 stars if it weren’t for the iCloud issues. I have the app on my phone, MacBook, and iPad. I mainly use noteability on my iPad and enjoyed being able to create a note, and seamlessly read or edit it on my laptop or phone. However every once in awhile noteability would freeze all of my notes on my iPad and I wouldn’t be able to read or edit until it was done syncing which would take at least 30 minutes, sometimes hours. What’s even more frustrating is that sometimes I’ll be editing a note and the app would be syncing that same note to the cloud in the background. So when I exit the note I have 2 sometimes 5 copies of the same note, and I have no idea which one is up to date. This especially happens if I have noteability open on more than one device at a time. I got so sick of it that I’ve disabled iCloud syncing and only use it on my iPad, which is a shame because I paid 10 extra dollars for the app on my MacBook (which is absolutely not worth it on its own by the way). The only device that gives all of the features that noteability has to offer is the iPad. With that being said, I absolutely love the app on my iPad and I hope that the dev team will fix this issue soon.

Extra Charges and No Support- find another note taking app!. I’ve had issues with syncing across Apple devices and received no assistance from notability due to lack of customer service. Out of desperation I rebought the app across all 3 of my devices ($45) as advised and my issue was still not resolved. Not only was my issue not resolved, but all of my notes from 3 years of college were completely erased since they weren’t properly synced as promised by the app. I had no issues with the app after this, however, within the last year they began advertising notability plus for an additional yearly fee. Since I was satisfied with the version I had already purchased, I elected to not start paying an extra $15/year just to continue taking my notes. Unfortunately, they are clearly desperate for subscribers because they have begun gradually removing all of the features that I love and were included in the original price. I am no longer able to do basic things such as select my own colors. Today I got a message that I have “reached my use capacity” and can’t even continue using the app to take notes for school for another 2 weeks. This is super frustrating since I’ve been using it with all of these features over the past 5 years and have recommended the app to several people. Please save your money and give your business to another app such as Goodnotes.

Palm Rejection Problems Since Updating. I can attest to the comments regarding the palm rejection issues after the recent update. Since the update, anytime I attempt to take class notes with the Apple Pencil results in erratic screen behavior. It will zoom in or out randomly, delete the last portion of what is written, or the screen will shift/shake. This only occurs when I am trying to write and my palm is resting on the lower portion of the screen. I have had some previous issues with palm rejection, mainly with the shifting of the screen or zoom but it has been manageable up until this update. It has become basically unusable for me in terms of handwriting since the recent update and the handwriting feature is nearly the sole purpose for purchasing the app in my case. I’ve basically had to resort to other apps for note taking because this has become nearly impossible to write on (unless I write without my palm on the screen and that is definitely not an alternative for me). After reading the previous comments, I have already performed a hard reset of my iPad (an iPad Pro 11” on iOS 12.3), turned off the palm rejection feature in Notability and turned it back on, and finally uninstalled the app completely then reinstalled. None of these attempts have rendered any improvement. Hopefully this is something that can be investigated by the developer and corrected quickly as this has been my preferred app for note taking.

Great for Handwritten notes, but inconsistent shapes. To help me diagram charts and graphs I like to use the shape feature where the app tries to guess the shape you’re drawing such as a square or a circle and makes it clean and orthogonal for you. One particular thing that frustrates me is that I would draw a rather crude rectangle and it only registers it as a rectangle like 40% of the time. The app has a tendency to turn my rectangles into an arrow or some random trapezoid or rhombus shape. I think a solution to this problem would be to have the app have a built in calibration setting that the user can set up. This way I can draw a rectangle and tell the app to ONLY recognize rectangle, circles, or oval shapes. I have no need for rectangles or random trapezoid shapes and don’t know why they were even considered when the conversion system is super buggy and inconsistent. Having more shapes for the app to recognize just makes it more difficult for the app to be consistent. Please give the user an option to select what shapes are recognized or at least gives us the ability to draw a shape and tell the app this is what we want and calibrate its sensitivity to how we draw shapes. Either that or give us the option to place the shape into our notes like a sticker as done in Microsoft word.

Best note-taking app. I’ve waited a long time to write this because I want to know an app fully before judging it. I’ve used Notability for the past 3+ years along with GoodNotes. I can confidently say that Notability is the superior app. Yes, there are many more features that I wish were present in both apps but, as a whole, this is the best note taking app. In its basic form, handwriting in the app is perfect. Whatever software that GoodNotes uses to try to improve your handwriting is incredibly annoying and causes it to look worse. Its not that way with Notability. What you write is what it shows. The file management style is much easier to follow than the endless folders in GoodNotes. Also, when major updates come, you don’t have to pay for it. Paper templates and being able to set your 3 most used colors and pen sizes right on the task bar will HOPEFULLY be coming to Notability soon. That is the biggest drawback I think. Having to do multiple touches every time I want to switch pen size can be annoying and when taking notes in lecture, can take up valuable time. Having those right on the top bar would be INVALUABLE. Other than that, this app is superior to GoodNotes in general.

💰 A universe of opportunities: Payoneer

Did you know that you can earn 25 USD from our site just by registering? Get $25 for free by joining Payoneer!

What’s happening with the new update???. After the new update, my notability is so laggy. Sometimes the screen just freezes and everything I have done is not saved. Also, I can’t believe that the developer changed the favourite pens feature. In the past, when I saved a favourite pen, I could save the thickness of pen as well. That means I could save two pens with different thickness. Now with the new favourite pen panels, every time I choose a pen, I have to choose a new thickness because there is no individual thickness of each pen saved. How could a feature become worse after an update? There are also other parts where it actually makes Notability less convenient to use, despite the new fancier style (but for what?!). Notability has been an integral part of my life and I genuinely loved it UNTIL this update. Developer, please rectify it fast, I don’t want to change to another note-taking app and have to learn everything again 😫

Best app for note taking & general typing documents. This is a brilliant app that I pretty much use daily in high school. There is *almost* nothing to hate about this app. The overall interface is extremely easy to use. Someone could easily know what to do without needing a tutorial! If you can afford it, I would recommend this app 10/10. However, ther are a few things I would like to see. Firstly, the ability to change the orientation of pages. Secondly, the ability to add a table. I find myself needing to do this time and time again and it frustrates me that I’m not able to do it in the app itself. Lastly, the ability to make shared documents where multiple people can edit and annotate on a singular document, similar to the way Microsoft does it. However, these are just small blemishes on an overall great app!

reliable, smooth app. Really happy w Notability. Have been using for a few years as my app for reading and marking up pdfs and its smooth and stable. i like that you can mark up an add pages in the middle of a pdf with notes. The new favourites palette is great, and I like they are providing some stationery options. My wishlist for additional features: - I love that it has split screen support but i wish i could do a split screen to see two pdfs in Notability at the same time - more options for stamps / stickers and the ability to add them to a hovering palette like favourites - more stationery options

Every person who use’s notability hates this update, here is why. Hello developers of notability. I use notability on a daily basis for all kinds of different things and it USED to be a great app. However though I am extremely disappointed and hate this new update! It’s extremely laggy when you type and overall doesn’t look great anymore. Don’t get me wrong I love the features that this app can do but it’s getting too annoying with all of its laggy issues. I have talked to my friends about this update and they all hate it. AND don’t even get me started when you put in an image it’s scrolls too fast! It’s now becoming so laggy and annoying that I am soon going to use the default notes app or good notes 5. Overall no one likes this update and I would say it’s the worst update a app has done, possibly even worse than YouTubes dislike button being “removed”!

Perfect for my needs. I've been using Notability for more than 5 years. As a civil funeral celebrant, I meet families to learn about their deceased family member and make arrangements for the funeral ceremony. I made a template of my four key data sheets and use it to enter notes about common items (music, speakers, proceedings, family members) and then go on to use blank pages to make notes about the person's life and specific reminders. I can copy and insert materials provided by the family. I can use as many or as few notes pages as I need! The capacity to highlight, delete and annotate text make meetings a breeze and on a number of occasions those I meet with are surprised at the facility of the process. The individual meeting records can then be used for my follow-up and ceremony writing, and then can be filed with other documents that are created in the production of the funeral ceremony for later reference. I have saved reams of paper! I admire Notability's capacity to create a variety of colourful and innovative formats and wish I was back in the classroom where I can see that professionals can exploit it to the full. Notability has always been well-priced in comparison with other software and in my opinion it has been an absolute winner!

Once great app now ruined by bugs. This app used to be pretty much flawless. But after recent updates, it feels like the experience you’d get from a free app. Every time I use it there is some bug. Often, you simply cannot scroll or use gestures of any kind on a note. You have to either exit the note or exit the app in order to move around. Another common issue is that the toolbar will stop functioning. You cannot switch between Pen, Eraser, Highlighter, use the Undo button, or anything. Also, the app will fail to register Apple Pencil input very frequently. Pretty much every not taking session, at multiple points I will have to tap the screen with the Apple Pencil several times before it starts registering input again. I don’t know if these issues are universal, but they’re pretty bad on my iPad Pro 10.5

I actually don‘t hate the new update (but it is very glitchy). I actually don‘t hate the new update… I mean, it‘ll take a little while to get used to, but considering all the new features notability has been adding, it was kind of overloading the innitial layout and I think a redesign was inevitable. The one thing though, is it‘s VERY glitchy now. Typing in particular takes FOREVER. I‘ve noticed sometimes the app just randomly crashes, it‘s much slower in general, and I can‘t change font without the entire app freezing. So, I know the developers are probably working really hard to fix this, but I‘ve had to resort to using pages (ew) to type things out, so it would be much appreciated if it could be fixed sooner rather than later. Edit: Main take away, can’t change font while in the note. Please fix?

Revolutionised note taking!. Everyone needs this app to take notes in class, it’s literally amazing! I use this app for uni and its awesome, I can record the lecturer speaking and take notes at the same time and can play back the recording and it also plays back my note taking in real time, so handy! You can take pictures and paste them into your notes, highlight, and make your writing colourful, and you can go back and edit notes at any time. I use an apple pen because I prefer handwriting, but you can also type notes in as well, or even change your handwriting into text (as long as you don’t write like a Doctor...:) another awesome feature is that you can export your notes into say PDF, or another program and look at your notes on your laptop! I just checked the updates and oh my goodness they’ve made it even better! Rotating a picture and showing page margins... yessss. Buy it, it’s totally worth it! It’s a game changer! Thank you to the developers who made this app! :) :)

Slays, but what extent???. Notability was amazing, I study for all my classes, took down hundreds of pages worth of notes, the features, design and usefulness were extremely helpful and allowed me to properly and effectively take notes, do assignments and record lessons comfortably. However. Day of my math exam, I went into notability, with the intentions of looking at my terms worth of math notes, only to be met with a loading screen. This didnt bother me much as I thought it would eventually load, but alas, it did not. Instead, it KICKED ME OUT of the app, and after multiple attempts of getting back in, turning on and off my ipad and a range of other things, i decided to delete it. I would have never delete it if i had known what was yet to come. Notability says that they back up your notes on iCloud, and I definitely have space so that wasnt the issue, but to my dismay, when i clicked back on (after a day of the app loading/ installing), My notes were nowhere to be seen. If it wasn’t assessment week and I didnt have every single note on there, I probably wouldnt mind, however, If i inevitably fail my math exam, I am blaming it on you notability. XOXO gossip girl 💋💋💋

Great App but needs some foundational work. Notability is a fantastic app that has proven to be vital to my daily study and workflow needs. I have tried some other note taking apps such as goodnotes, however, found myself coming back because of the superior feature set notability has (Voice recording, better PDF Search, better shape tool). The app is an easy recommend, however, it lacks some seemingly very basic “useability” features as of April 2020. Where notability needs to improve is in the app workflow. Something Goodnotes gets correct. My complaints are: You are unable to access the same note simultaneously (Mac & iPad and iPad & iPad with multi note) like goodnotes. A feature that is incredibly useful when it comes to working in one document. The Mac app needs some serious work to catch up to the competition. Features such as the simultaneous viewing I mentioned above and handoff. Notability does not take advantage of iPadOS and its ability to work in multiple spaces (not just multi note) The filing system is limited in terms of you are not able to put folders inside of other folders so organisation can get a bit tedious. I would still recommend notability over goodnotes because of the superior feature set, but in the longer term, goodnotes seems to have a better foundation in terms of general use, making it easy to recommend to people who are not interested in the voice recording feature.

Very helpful with my study. I’m very happy with using notability to assist with my study. I’m going paperless since I have downloaded this app. I like how it can group different subjects into different folders. It is just so user friendly compare to other study app I have been used. Several suggests: 1. It might be better if we can create folders inside each subclass so for each subject I can have lecture notes in one folder and revision notes or past papers in another folder. I think that will be better than making all notes in the same folder. 2. When we zoom out of the note to try to view two page at the same time it will be better if we can put two pages next to each other. Now we can only scroll up and down. 3. It will be great if each note can be marked or flagged. I’m revising for my final exams now and I would like to mark the notes I have went through so when I come back to it next time I can easily know where to keep going.

The best with organisation and productivity. I love how receptive Notability is with their customer’s feedback, and I can witness how they are constantly changing and adapting to out needs. The organisation is so much better than any other apps in my opinion, definitely better than GoodNotes. A feature to improve on is that when you leave the application for a bit, and return to it, there is a slight lag where the opening blue Notability screen appears for a second or two, and THEN it directs you to your recent worked document. Could this feature be removed? Can Notability immediately direct me to my document without the slight lag? A minor feature, but could definitely be improved on! Overall, love it!

Wow very nice update (8.0). This update pretty much implements all the deal-breaking features that were missing before but were found in GoodNotes, such as searching handwritten notes and converting them to text. Now it has (almost) everything special found in GoodNotes and much more. Now unique to Notability is not only the voice-writing dual recording feature but also split screen! Split screen! Still somethings are implemented better and more intuitively in GoodNotes such as ability to quickly add shapes, holding and selecting text in PDF files (helpful for using define function and other actions), and also I prefer notebook organising in GoodNote as well as the notebook styles and customise ability with the cover pages etc. Please add another depth to the notes folder hierarchy, would be so helpful for organisation. But everything else seems so much better now in Notability, I am now leaning towards switching back to this as my primary note taking app once again.

Noise in the recording. Notability is a must have app when I am in a meeting. It helps me out in lots of situations with the notes and recordings. As most of time I will playback the recordings, the noise made by the pencil hitting the screen really annoy me. Could developer or anyone have any idea to reduce that noise? Thanks! Ok, after a little study, no one click solution right now. But if I were the developer of it, I would value this feature because recording is one of the unique feature of Notability compared to other note apps like GoodNotes. The app knows when the pencil hit the screen and a clear sample of the noise is quite easy to collect. There are great possibilities to get the job done in a grace way.

Please add improvement to writing, searching and quick bar. My hand writings appear more messy on notability and there should be quick colour switch and basic function tap like good notes 5. In addition please add options where you can only get rid of highlighter not text. Personally I prefer the layout and pages on notability but GoodNotes are better at details and handwriting experience! In addition searching for words in all documents are hard, there are words that I wrote perfectly or words on images won’t show on in all search, please fix! Improving searching functions and I lost notes before by logging into diff Apple ID! New subscription is confusing and greedy but I’m glad I still have the features I purchase from before, nevertheless any new features or purchase I didn’t have will be locked behind subscriptions for us long term notability supporters):

Amazing. This is the second favourable review I have written for this app. I have owned it for quite a while now, a year perhaps, and it still impresses me. I am involved in theatre, Primary Ethics teaching, literature clubs and every thing I take on it accommodates. I was using it just now and was so happy with it I had to tell someone. I have been using computers a great deal for 30 years in work and recreation and I find this software the most flexible and useful I have ever come across in my sphere. THAT WAS what I WROTE A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO AND IS THE LAST FAVOURABLE REVIEW I WILL WRITE. I was such a big fan but it is now virtually unusable on the iPhone. This is a common complaint why the hell don’t you fix it!!!!

The best note taking app. Trust me, I have tried most of them and listened to many reviews. This is by far the best note taking app. best this game for me is that it syncs smoothly between I pad and the Mac book. Notes are also on my phone if I need a quick reference. The reason I bought an IPad is this app. IT is helping me immensely with my studies and it is sold for peanuts for it’s potential. Please don’t change a thing. Only one suggestion, if you could, addition of shapes,tables. I can live without it if not doable. Please don’t do anything that would compromise the stability of the app. Thanks for a fantastic app and keep up the good work.

This is my favourite writing app. Once Apple finally perfected the stylus, I started downloading all sorts of different writing apps for my iPad pro. After using lots of different ones over the course of a couple of years, Notability was the one I kept coming back to. No it’s my default note taking app, paired with my Apple Pencil. The ability to convert writing into text, the smoothness of the pen strokes, the ability to select pen strokes and highlighting and immediately change their style, from colour to thickness. These are the traits I like most and only a small fraction of the full range of features. I like it, it’s my favourite, I recommend it..

Initially fantastic app now rendered useless. I adored everything about this app and it had become the only app I used for note-taking. Excellent features, great handwriting feel (far superior to Notes app) and the recording feature is so useful in so many work/study contexts. HOWEVER, a few updates ago, the iCloud backup feature made the app need to re-download EVERY note each time I re-enter the app. You cannot open the note while re-downloading and this can take anywhere from 2-10 minutes (no exaggeration, and the app must be open to do so)! This means I can never quickly access my notes! Quickly switching in and out of the app within minutes, even with Background App Refresh disabled, causes everything to re-download. Extremely frustrating; particularly at work when important information is in a past note and I’m forced to idly wait and make others wait until I can access it. I need to access my notes across devices but turning off iCloud is the only impracticable option. This has rendered the app useless to me now. GINGER LABS, PLEASE FIX THIS ERROR! 🙏🏽

Seeuchange. Features to improve: 1. Enable creating folders freely on the left hand side section, by dragging notes you want to put together. Now it’s hard to categorise folders as you have to put notes to certain place on the list, often unrelated notes get in the folder and it’s not quite user friendly to take them out 2. Within a folder, other than listing the notes by name, created a date and modified date, allow user to list them freely, as organising notes usually happens after you finished writing the note. 3. Apple Pencil strokes: not sure if you can improve this from you side, but the size of the stroke is somehow reversed? Especially when writing Asian language characters, when you pressing the hardest to finish a stroke, it is supposed to become thinner and thinner and finishes like a dog’s tail, but in the app doing strokes like this it actually thickens at the end. By using the exact same iPad and Apple Pencil in drawing app like sketches, it does not detect stroke strength like notability. Please improve stroke detection to make it like writing with real pencil on paper.

Only 1 thing would make it better…. This app is one of the best that I have used for my uni studies and will continue to do so until I graduate. I pay for the premium membership and it is totally worth every $$$. I would highly suggest for all those with an iPad or apple product. The only thing that would make it so much better for me is if it were accessible on the Microsoft store or via the internet. I do not own a MacBook or iMac and would love to be able to do more with the app on my desktop computer if it were available. I hope that there is a plan to expand the application to non-apple devices because I believe that in doing do it would really increase the users/customers. I know that I will be suggesting the app to all of the people I know with an Apple device. So please, please, PLEASE consider expanding!!! But otherwise, if you are considering if you should download this app… THE ANSWER SHOULD BE A “YES”!!!

Don't change something if it isn't broken. I fail to see why the developers felt the need to compromise functionality for minimalistic aesthetics. The purpose of a note taking app is to take notes, not to admire the interface. Essential functions (such as recently deleted, note search, bookmarks, etc) have been compressed and hidden in unsuspecting places to enhance the stylistic interface, making them inconvenient and inaccessible to new users. This new update offers little improvement, and is a complete downgrade from the old version of Notability in terms of practicality and efficiency. All of this is not to mention the note limit and user limits, which once reached, locks your notes into read-only, and must require a subscription to edit again. Again, while the interface may look fresh and sleek, the complete ignorance towards the need of users is what defines this new update as a useless liability. Aesthetics are not what we look for when downloading note taking apps, and now when using Notability, which once was a convenient turn-to for assignments that offered user-friendly functions, has now become a frustrating battle against unnecessary, newly added, stylistic features. We did not need this, so please at least add an option to change it back.

Awesome, tiny flaw. I LOVE this app, perfect for taking notes and not wasting a tonne of paper. I did take one recording during a lecture, the sound is great, can hear even when moving further away, however the background “tap tap tap” of the Apple Pencil is extremely distracting. I have tried altering the tone frequencies, but it didn’t make much difference. If there is any way to “muffle” this a bit more it would be a perfect app! Photos of my slides with scribble all over them, doing up diagrams during workshops... totally awesome! I have played a little with convert to text and it hasn’t misread anything I have written so far, even adjusts the font size by what I have written!

Five stars. I take a huge number of hand written notes, have tried all the notes apps, and always end up returning to Notability. The latest update has just finished indexing six months worth of my hand written notes (probably over 1,000 pages). And I have been totally blown away by how accurate and fast the searches of all my notes now are. Just amazing. I am a very demanding user with extremely high expectations of technology. I rarely write reviews and only do so when an app really deserves feedback. In the case of Notability the developers have produced a fantastic app that works extremely well.

Update ruined it.. Good review are old and don’t reflect the current reality of using this expensive app. Small aesthetic “improvements” (actually preferred the previous interface) ruined functionality. The app has now stopped working offline and doesn’t let you take notes until it has checked for the gazillionth time your subscription status. I pay for a yearly sub, I’d like to use it whenever and however I wish…if the developers don’t mind? Will cancel and move to good notes. A typical 21st century software: a good idea, poorly executed and with more concerns for the developers’ ease of life than the consumer’s satisfaction. Not a serious working product due to its unreliability. Edit: seems to have been fixed. Rating back to max stars. Please devs, Don’t do it again!

Disappointed with recent updates. DO NOT BUY THIS APP; CHECK REVIEWS: NO POSITIVE REVIEWS FOR LAST YEAR….THIS IS A RUINED APP….USED TO BE BRILLIANT: have come to update this since the text I submitted below…it is even worse than what I have said…you cannot rename documents on the iOS version without going through a ridiculous procedure, that continually does not work but kicks you back into the document itself…GET THIS; in 2023 you cannot select all text in a document name and delete it, instead you have to backspace out the names, BUT you can’t even hold your finger down on the backspace…you have to tap it for every letter…otherwise it simply kicks you into the document…it is ludicrous and completely inconvenient…which is the point of a note taking app…look elsewhere if you want convenience. I was using this to mark work as a teacher….won’t be anymore as the renaming of documents on iOS (and I deal with hundreds of documents) is now SOOO slow….you were able to open the note and change the name in the note itself, it also let you highlight the name and delete it in one go….NOW I have to hold my finger on the note, wait for it to pop out a menu, choose rename and then backspace out the text that is in there….takes an extra couple of minutes….that’s hundreds of extra couple of minutes that I don’t have 👎

Great new features — same ol’ crippling iCloud issues. I once viewed Notability as the pinnacle of stability on iOS. I trusted more than system apps, and used it thoroughly for university, with iCloud syncing between iPad, iPhone and Mac. As other reviews have mentioned, something happened a few updates ago that has fundamentally broken the app for iCloud users. Nearly every time I open the app, it has to redownload the entire library of files and sort them into their Subject folders, basically unusable for the (long) duration of this. I had held hope that a bug fix update was in the works, and the large recent update had me optimistic that the situation would be better. But despite some seriously great features added, the issue remains the same, and I can not recommend the application until the issue is resolved. My partner, who also uses Notability and has ~700 files saved, is now in the situation where they do not trust the application to keep things safe, and is having to export out each file to a safer format. The new features in this update kind of makes the situation worse, because I really want to use Notability. But it’s basically unusable for me, which is supremely disappointing. I encourage the developers to reach out about this issue, and I would love to be able to change my score to five-stars once this serious bug is fixed.

Terrible - Notes keep deleting/disappearing (0 stars). I have had so many of my notes disappear, or half of the pages delete, or (if I’ve downloaded a PDF and written over the top of it), the writing disappears. I am currently at uni and the notes I take are not only time consuming, but extremely important and the fact that this app can so easily delete, change, or remove the notes is absolutely despicable. I have no idea how many other of my notes have been affected as I only become aware of it when I’m looking for a particular set of notes and I can’t find it, or I find a particular set of notes and when I open it half the pages are missing/my writing has been removed (on PDFs). If you want to get the job done, then choose absolutely any other note taking app than this one. In addition to this, it uses a lot of my iPad’s battery. I have been in contact with someone via Facebook Messenger, but all of a sudden they stopped replying - pretty terrible customer service if you ask me. If I could go back, I wouldn’t have even downloaded this app if it were for free (let alone the $14 I paid for it - absolute waste)

Disaster and Relief!. i never leave reviews but this experience was worth sharing. i thought i had lost all my information - total panic station - nothing made sense - total disaster there one minute gone the next - only files that survived we’re ones locked in folders - no explanation - real measure of an app isn’t when things are good but how things transpire when things go wrong. tech support took it seriously and helped me and stayed in communication while i was losing my mind. no stupid stuff like have you tried switching it on or off etc. if you don’t have backup switched on pleeease do it - icloud syncing is only syncing not a back up - protect your data like i didn’t. thanks johnathan i’m tech support for communication.

Great app! Hard to fault. Enjoying it so far, been testing various things out for the past month before I use it this semester at uni. Overall the standard of the app is really high and I think it’s well worth the money if you’re remotely serious about electronic notes. Some things I’d love to see are: A darker line that separates pages, or better yet a small gap as well. I suspect no gap was a conscious decision by the developer/s for continuity (fantastic for maths), but it’s too easy to miss when a page starts and ends, and I’d like my notes to be legible as PDF’s in future, so making the page end line darker would be great. Also the available size of the lines for writing and graph paper are a bit of an awkward size for me. I write on my 12.9” iPad mostly in portrait mode, and I can’t write on the small line size as it’s too small, and the medium size does work, but it’s so spaced apart that I’m unable to actually fit much onto a page. 2/3 of what I write on a regular paper notebook at best. Everyone will have different needs here due to different iPad sizes and writing in portrait vs landscape, but a few more line sizes would be really appreciated. Keep up the great work guys :)

Not a trustworthy and respectful developing team. 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮Everyone knows abt their new subscription policy, very disappointing. I purchased both iPhone and Mac version just to show the support of how much I enjoy using Notability on iPad, despite I don’t even use them elsewhere than iPad. Now I really regretted. Honestly the subscription fee is nothing to me, it’s the attitude and decision that they make really hurts ppl’s feeling. It also make me look like a fool since I have recommended this app to so many ppl around me. 😇😇😇 There are many old users out there struggling, trying to export their notes. Despite the fact, I might be using this app until the day that my self esteem defeats my laziness. But it does not contrast to me as an old user, will keep trashing Notability to everyone around me and try my best to stop any possible new user to use this app. 🗑🗑🗑 Maybe the developer think that they have earned all this due to their good techniques, please remember the reputation was also built by all the users around the world. Think about all those YouTubers who uploaded video about this app. 🤔🤔🤔👎 “Morality doesnt constrain capitalism” suits this event. And I hope one day you will get a taste of it and hopefully it’s not something as minor as a personal replaceable noting app😊😊😊 Best wishes to the developers you guys can definitely earn a hell lot from the subscriptions💵💵💵

O. Dear App Store staff: Recently, the notability has been carried out - Item update, from buyout system to subscription system. November 1, 2022 In the future, all users who previously bought out Notability will not subscribe. Under conditions, it will not be able to sync with iCloud services provided by Apple. Notability's notes, this restriction comes from Notability. I recognize. This restriction has infringed on my rights and interests as an original buyout user. Root According to the official document of the App Store Review 3.1.2(a) in Guidelines: If you are changing Your existing app to a subscription-based business Model, you should not take away the primary Functionality existing users have already paid for. # When changing the business model, the issuer should not damage the right of the buyer. Benefits. Such updates should also not be revised by Apple. I hope Apple It can deal with this and protect the legality of users' purchases in the App Store. Rights and interests, I will also respond to the China Consumer Rights Protection Association.

New update has ruined/removed so many valuable features. I have used notability for years throughout high school and now uni. Since the new update, typing has been SOO laggy and everything has been so much more difficult. I no longer know how to colour pick, no longer know how to attach multiple audio recordings to one document, I can no longer copy and paste, or even select anywhere on my screen to begin typing. I am so incredibly disappointed in this update and I’m not too sure what the intention of it really was. It has a basically just changed the already appealing and simple interface to a more confusing and buggy interface with less features. But now we get a laser pointer too I guess?? I’m not sure if that was a thing before but I don’t really find the tool useful anyhow. Please bring back the old notability. I can no longer stand to take notes on this app due to the dreadful lag and lack of functionality. Now I guess I’ll just use GoodNotes.

Disappointed. Notability, which used to have a buy-out system (including downloads and in-app purchases), was updated to the new version on November 1, 2021, and now has a free download + subscription system (the update announcement did not specify how the subscription system will be changed). For those who bought the software under a buyout, it will only be available for a free subscription for one year, with an additional subscription fee after that. This kind of behavior violates the purchase agreement already reached with the old user, belongs to the commercial fraud. Moreover, as a note-taking software, the unsubscribed free version has limited functions including "limited note editing", and even a dot will be recorded, which means that the use of free users will be greatly restricted, so the software is also suspected of inducing consumption. The official Apple platform has the responsibility and obligation to punish such behavior.

Incredible app - use for all my notes. Being able to store all my notes across my Mac/iPad/iPhone is amazing. It’s better than OneNote as it’s writing tools are much better. Snapping from free draw to shapes is intuitive, writing is silky smooth and notes update across devices on the fly. I have the passed 6 years of uni notes on all my devices, and the hand writing is searchable (and convertible to text) so I can find my notes very easily. I have sent suggestions to the developers in the past and they have implemented them into the app. I think it’s so good because they actually listen to their users and update the app quickly. Can’t recommend enough!

Excellent note-taking tool. Notability definitely lives up to its name in enhancing the ability to take notes. I've used this app since Year 12 and during my university studies! Extremely helpful in allowing me to highlight keywords/phrases, jot ideas and overall save printing money and paper. One recommendation I have is perhaps to add a function where the user can 'pin' or 'star' particular 'notes' in a 'Subject'? This would be fantastic since I would like to favourite, say, a manual/assessment rubric at the top for quick reference. Thanks so much for all your amazing work and efforts, Notability team! You're definitely notable.

love the app but recent update is killing my battery life. I’ve been a loyal and dedicated user of this app on my iPad(s) for almost a decade. The style of this newest update isn’t my cup of tea and I much prefer the old look, but hopefully I can learn to live with it. However, I’ve experienced more lag and bugs since the recent update than I have in the entire rest of my time using the app. Specifically, notes are taking up to 20 seconds to reload even if I’ve just switched to another app for a few seconds or checked notifications. Notability has also been draining my iPad’s (healthy) battery like crazy the past few days - worst I noticed was going from 57% to 51% in just two or three minutes after importing some PDFs. I’ve always found this app to be useful, useable and even enjoyable - I really hope I won’t have to switch to one that is more functional than Notability currently is.

Version 14 has ruined this app for me. The “new and improved” Notability is anything but. The floating toolbar is intrusive and limited in placement. They removed the favourites bar (a bar which allowed you to save your most used tools and settings that you could access with a single click), this “update” may just be the single worst decision a company has ever made in the “productivity” space. They moved the back button, the BACK button, for no other reason than “new and improved” (again, anything but). It’s a shame really, because some of the added features such as easier to add images are actually good, but they are farrrrr outweighed by the terrible removals/changes to the core model. This update is the epitome of “don’t fix what ain’t broke”. I’ll be cancelling my subscription and changing apps until they change it back.

Needs higher level of organisation. I’ve been using this app for note taking during lectures, all was going well until I started a new semester and wanted to archive my notes from the previous semester so they weren’t in my way when taking new notes. However, I didn’t want to lose the organisation of those notes, so that they would still be easy to find later on. The only way I could effectively achieve this was to send all my notes into google drive as PDFs, and then delete them all from notability. While this is fine, being able to put all those dividers and subjects into a folder on notability would have been much better, as it would have kept everything in one place, which was my plan for notability. My only complaint so far. Add folders, please. Thank you.

Game Changer. I’ve been using this note-taking app for studies and work and find it super easy to use. It keeps all my work in the one place and supports a variety of online drives to switch my work from device to devices. However, the issue with the Text tool highlighting in front of the text (makes it blurry) should be fixed (preferably like the actual highlighting tool). Some users like myself use the text tool to highlight and ‘define’ words. I would also like to recommend making the ‘undo’ key more prominent; It’s easier and faster to rest my left thumb near the undo action when my right hand is taking notes using the Apple Pencil but, the undo action is a bit small and I miss-tap it. Having my write right-hand taking quick notes and left-hand ready to undo errors is a great way to quickly take notes, this was the selling point for me.

Love the minimalist setup but lots of annoying errors. Switched to notability at the start of this semester purely due to the love for the beautiful page set up. Previously used GoodNotes for all my lecture note taking and even though the topbar are not as pretty, suits all the purpose and the mac sync is amazing. For notability, the eraser sometimes just does not work at all and leaves an ugly mark that CANNOT be removed by eraser, the screen will get stuck for no reason which is really annoying had to restart during the lecture. But the most annoying thing happened today- I tried to sync the notes with iCloud but had to quit in the middle because I can’t stand the waiting time so I did the usual thing- restart. Now more than half my notes are gone thank you very much notability and I haven’t figure out how to SYNC on my MacBook. So disappointed and definitely reconsider if you are like me who switched from GoodNotes

Useful but with drawbacks. Notability is really useful for taking notes for class (especially in uni when annotating a powerpoint is easier during a lecture). It has allowed me to make some truly useful notes! That being said, there are some bugs that can be really annoying. The two most prominent for me are that when I try to change the format of a note into A4, when I click ‘Apply’ the change isn’t saved. Instead, if I go back into templates, I find that the app has switched it back to ‘Letter (optimised)’. This occurs even if I haven’t even started to note anything down, and it’s particularly frustrating when I’m trying to print my notes; they look so small when they’re in the letter format! I like using a particular online template that looks like a ruled notebook, and I don’t know if this is the issue or not, but even so I think for the price I paid to use the app I should be able to have any template changed in A4 format. The second problem is the zoom feature. I can’t zoom in or outon anything without the pdf file becoming jumbled and unreadable. In the time it takes the file to load back to normal, I’m not able to click away from it; the only thing I can do is exit the app. It’s really annoying when I’m trying to edit something for class. Despite these issues, Notability has some great features that I love using for my notes. Hope you guys are able to fix these problems! Thanks

Great (at least it used to be). This app was once a great tool for note taking, study, and even art, but it’s just mediocre at best nowadays, changing what was once a fairy reasonable one-time purchase to a subscription plan for a NOTE-TAKING APP, making features difficult to use or just straight up removing them in the name of minimalism, and subsequently removing any kind of personality or soul, and the fact that the app is just irritatingly laggy, especially on larger notes. In some cases it’s virtually impossible to even paste an image without the app crashing, removing a portion of previous work done if you’re lucky, or corrupting and causing the note to just vanish without a trace. In my own opinion, the last actually good change was the addition of the pencil tool. Most of what happened after that was just the devs gutting their app. Find a different app to take notes if you were going to get this one, I’m sure there’s way better options out there.

The update is making notability losing its edge. I chose to purchase notability cus I am a fan of its professional design and the convenience it offers. I used to highlight use just one tab then write or ease with another tab now the update has caused great inconvenience. It seems to me that the goal of the update is it make the design more neat and simple but I dt need that. We use this app because we like things convenient and efficient so we don’t need this fancy stuff. If I want it pretty and fancy I will just use goodnotes in the first place. U are upsetting the loyal customers. Ps please give me back my vertical tool bar !!!!!!! I really love the design cus it’s so convenient. The new movable one is not as good cus it only give me 3 options and the old one can let me switch different tools and colours at the same time within one tab

One gripe, but it’s probably because Apple. When I am using the pencil to write, then I use the selection tool (to move an object, or copy and paste, or convert to text), then I double tap the Apple Pencil to switch back to the pen mode, it switches to the erase mode instead, then if I double tap again, it switches back to the selection tool. I think in the Apple Pencil settings there should be an option to use double tap to switch between a “pen and eraser” only, not just “eraser and last tool”, or “current tool and last tool”. Only workaround is to manually select the pen mode after using the selection tool. This might sound petty, but I switch between all 3 of these tools very frequently and it constantly slows me down.

Overall, an excellent note taking app. The level of organisation notability provides is exceptional, and the capability to link google and Dropbox accounts to the app and still back up all notes to them is a clever feature. I love the simplicity of the user interface while working on a document and I find this to be superior in Notability than in other note taking apps like GoodNotes. My only issue is that when importing files from Dropbox to notability like word docs or PDFs, it sends a duplicate of the same file, which is a bit of an inconvenience to remove every time I import a file. Furthermore, I believe the shape detection feature can be improved, as I have found on multiple occasions that the app cannot recognise and correct some shapes that I wish to draw (GoodNotes seems to perform this particular feature better than Notability). Otherwise, Notability is one of the best, if not the best note taking app for the iPad.

Great study tool. I have been using this app for years now. Since 2015, and each year this app just gets better and better. It’s been a great way for me to create concise clear notes. I’m a person that prefers handwriting my notes and practice questions over typing as it helps me memorise and understand concepts easily. With the writing tool I’m able to do this so seamlessly while listening to lectures. And now the new tape function. This new function prompted me to write this review. Active recall has never been made more simple for me. Love this app. Please stay good.

Gone completely downhill. So with the latest release 11.8.8 my account is back working properly. Which is fantastic, I was showing as basic account even though I was on premium. Notability features are great and with well over 1000 notes stored, id be lost without it. I spoke with support today and it seems the previous support issues are now resolved. I use it for everything, import pdfs to make notes or edits on, meeting notes, full planner and diary I use daily, recordings correspond to your notes which makes minuting easy, auto back up. To Google drive. Plus the drawing and scribble

New Notability and Laggy. Ok, the new notability is ok, although I would think we could edit where which slot I could put the pen tool and stuff. I hate the pencil tool so I want to delete that. But for the most part, the most important part of an app is not to lag. Notability keeps freezing on my phone. An iPhone 14 Pro? Like that’s a big issue. In addition, the iPad version is also glitchy like that. It sometimes freezes like the phone version but not as bad. The iPhone version just completely freezes and no buttons work. It’s definitely not to do with the phone because I can scroll down to the Notification Centre with absolutely not lag or freezing. Overall, with these issues fixed, I think the app would do pretty well.

What’s happened??. This app was functioning fantastically, until a few recent updates. Firstly, I noticed when inserting images that it no longer displays the most recent image first. This is incredibly frustrating when taking notes from lectures, as I now have to scroll down in order to access the most recent images. I would say it takes about 5-10x longer, especially for long lectures where I will have to scroll through dozens of photos to get to the one I want, rather than it being on top. After the update today, I noticed that the lines no longer stick to the words, and so you end up with lines on the page going haphazardly through words. Previously, the lines on the page would move up and down dynamically so as to keep the words on the line - however, now the lines are static and regularly-spaced down the page, which does not match the words I’m typing. This looks awful. I have since turned off the lines on the document that I am currently working on, but it just looks terrible. Please fix these things, and stop making unnecessary changes. The only reason that I’m still using Notability is for continuity this semester - however, I am very much considering switching, unless something changes.

🧠 Join the movement! Experience the world's No.1 brain supplement

Imagine you at your best. All the time. Picture yourself at your sharpest and most productive. Your most alert and focused. Your most lucid, creative and confident. At work. At play. In every area of your life. Add Mind Lab Pro® v4.0 to your daily routine and uncap your true potential. Buy Now!

Subscription unfair to current customers. DO NOT UPDATE if you still wanna have customized pen colours and many other features for your notes in the future. This new version is only allow existing users to enjoy the app until November 1, 2022. Afterwards, you can chose to downgrade to free version (no auto-backup/iCloud backup/customized pen colours and so on….) or pay 14.99 per year.

Removed edit option, are you kidding me??. Updated notability and found out they removed “unlimited” editing unless I upgrade for $16/year. Absolutely unacceptable, I use this app for vet school…not anymore, currently trying to find a way to switch everything to GoodNotes. Seriously, anyone who is even considering using this app, just don’t. P.S. Thanks Notability for implementing this “feature” 3 days before my midterms starts….

Don’t buy this. They are charging you a subscription fee for something you already own.

U r cheating on all of your royalty customers. Stop cheating! Do right thing!!

Very useful. Allows you to follow along with the teacher with synchronized recording of the session to what you write down. however i really wish there were different viewing options like 4 slides in one page or face to face and not only continuous downward flowing pages. I have a problem writing notes in this app. i download PowerPoint lectures and i dont have enough room on each slide to write my notes and i keep find myself adding new pages after each slide to write it the teachers notes. I wish there was a blank paper adjacent to all the imported slides to give me a place to take notes freely. Please developers i hope this gets noticed.

The new subscription based model is a scam!. Notability is cheating loyal customers by forcing us to use the new subscription model!! Report their scam to Apple so actions can be taken against them!

No grandfathering?. Paid for the app. Liked it pretty well but now I'm going to lose features that I've already paid for? That's a clear violation of Apple guidelines. Time to move on. Subscription overload.

Subscription? No thanks.. So disappointed that Notability has become a subscription app without grandfathering in a plan for the users who actually purchased the app (and possibly add-ons too) the way other apps have done. It almost feels fraudulent to have services you paid for in good faith taken away. Went from a 5 star app to a 1 star for me. I don’t do subscriptions, so guess I’ll be switching to Goodnotes.

Bugs. A lot of people hated the new update but I thought it was fine. What I’m NOT fine with is the bugs that came with the update. Frequently, when I use some other pen/tool (other than the main one) and then try to switch back to the main pen, it just doesn’t work (like the button is broken). When I try to press it it just either writes behind the button or asks me if i want to paste clipboard?? I didn’t think I would have to write a review because I figured it would have been fixed in two updates or so but the issue still persists. For a paid app thats been around so long I expected better

New update is unusable. They recently did I big update to the system and the whole app has become unusable and there seems to be little attempt to fix it. I am repeatedly un-able to open the pen tool after switching to a different tool, which has led to me missing a lot of important information from my lectures because I am unable to write and have to spend time trying to fix it. There are plenty of other bugs in the new update that need to be addressed. Really annoyed I am paying for this after they took a well functioning app and broke it. I am going to need to now switch systems even though all my notes are on this platform because I can no longer use it in my lectures

Themes are not free.... Why though?,why so greedy?! I just don’t understand why charging for something when u already sold the app, is not that I’m having a trial!!!!

Lost access to all features. I purchased Notability back in 2019 (in fact I purchased it twice back when you had to pay for the iOS and Mac apps separately) and I was granted the full Classic plan when the company switched to a subscription model. As of last week, I am unable to use the features of the app as I have suddenly been downgraded to the free tier plan without notice or explanation. I’ve contacted Notability support all they’ve provided me is a regurgitation of the same troubleshooting steps posted on their site for general subscription issues along with an assurance that this is a “known issue”. Here I am, a paying customer, unable to use the app I’ve purchased during a crucial time in my studies. This is unacceptable.

Scam. Paid a stupid amount of money to unlock the full app for a “lifetime” only to have to pay a subscription after one year. Do not buy

DO NOT UPGRADE. The new version has converted to an annual subscription mode, and old purchased users NEED TO SUBSCRIBE AGAIN. This is ridiculous, I used to love notability, but now 🙄

Used to Work Great but now it just crashes constantly. Can’t get this app to stop crashing. I can’t believe I paid so much for this for it to stop working on me.

Really bad decision for the subscription policy. Was a normal application with many bugs, for example night mode switch overnight, however the violate of the “single time purchase” is just pure scam, not recommended at all, good notes is on 50% off, don’t miss it

Subscription for users who paid the full price?. So ginger lab decided to switch to a subscription based model? So every existing user who paid the full price for a lifetime access to basic features of this app will be blocked behind a paywall? How can you take away features when I paid 14$CAD for this app? This is probably the worst move ginger lab could’ve made. This is also a breach of apple’s guideline.

Buggy. My highlights will not straighten for most documents and it is so annoying. I don’t know what happened but before the highlight would automatically straighten. This is extremely frustrating. They need to fix it immediately.

v14 ruined it. Notability went from best to worst overnight: v14. They removed the good features such as the favourites toolbar, made a floating toolbar and very clunky “modern” ui.

False advertising. Subscription model is taking away functions users previously paid for

Why freemium. Bought this app a couple years ago so I wouldn’t have to pay annual and now they’re changing it, you should have given all old users the subscription forever and start charging new customers annually. Not happy, choose a different note taking app over this. This is one of my first reviews on here because it’s so scummy to change payment models like that.

GREEDY SCAM. Paid for lifetime services. Not even after one year, the app is now “free” and forces us, the loyal customers who paid for the full service, to switch to a subscription plan just to keep the same functionalities THAT WE PAID FOR. Such a greedy company. Will switch to other apps.

I paid for this app and for its features which is now subscription based. What? I literally paid for this note taking app, I’m glad it’s free now but where’s the features I bought? iCloud sync is now a monthly subscription feature? I’m so confused and extremely disappointed.

Favorite. I love this app but In this version the favorite/presets are kind of broken, I set my preset but later the same day it become the default preset?

Stole my money. I purchased this app full price. Now, they have literally taken it away from me and I was forced into a subscription model. This is against Apple’s TOS - Section 3.1.2(a), but they don’t seem to care.

Disappointing. The longer I use the app the more bugs I come across. Not a user friendly app.

Used to work very well.. None of the customizable fonts and sizes have worked for me since the past few updates on my SE. I’m stuck with one style of font and size. Until it’s fixed, it’s really just the Notes app that’s already on your phone with a price tag slapped on it. It’s a five star app otherwise, but I don’t even wanna use it until this is fixed.

WORST UPDATE EVER. Since the update, this app has changed drastically. I downloaded and even paid for an annual subscription because I often use the Split View feature for school which I think is great especially with note taking from PowerPoints. This app is so frustrating that I would rather write on paper again. I wish I can get a refund for this. I do not care for aesthetics as this used to be the most functional and practical app for note-taking and honestly loved it so much in the beginning. My biggest frustration since the update is how OFTEN my screen freezes especially on Split View and I know this is from the update because it was not happening before the update. It was FLAWLESS like why do they have to update the app?? I am writing this in class right now because I cannot keep up with my notes since the app keeps freezing. I am so frustrated. I unfortunately have a semester and a half worth of notes in here and I will have to transfer all of them to a different app. So disappointing. FIX IT. Also the toolbar SUCKSSSSS. Why ruin a perfectly functional APP?! WHY?!

Subscription? Really?. I have been an avid Notability user…will no longer be supporting Ginger Labs! Not impressed! Greedy and unethical developer!! Trying to harvest payments from current users. You cannot downgrade my current version and remove features that I have already PAID FOR!! Are you following Apple’s guidelines (3.1.2a). Plus your app isn’t THAT great or different from other apps out there. Shame on you!!! Good-bye Notability!!

App was great. Before they updated the interface. Please return the option for a favourites bar, with all the different tools I can choose to put there. The new toolbar is inconvenient and clunky. At least, give people the option to choose between old and new styles of interface.

Update makes no sense?. I paid for this app years ago and this new update is making me subscribe to the premium membership to have iCloud sync and all the other features I thought I already paid for?? Ridiculous

Hear me out. To potential notability users: GoodNotes just went free this week BUT retained the same pricing just like before ($11), as a one-off in app purchase now rather than an upfront payment. Existing users are of course not affected. AND it continues to allow family sharing. Definitely give that a go if you haven’t already made up your mind. Don’t fall prey to notability’s $15.5 yearly subscription model or listen to their crap about not supporting family sharing for whatever reason. If audio recording is a must, head over to Collanote instead. It’s completely free and works well. Now I’m actually glad notability went subscription to push people to discover other apps that undergo more conscionable transition to not jeopardize customer relationships. I feel sorry for the people stuck with this once-epic note taking app by a greedy company

Some bugs need to be fixed!. First of all, I really like this app and recommend it to anyone who wishes to take notes for classes/work/etc. I no longer need to print out lecture slides for my classes and save a lot of paper. However, I do have couple of suggestions to improve the app and I hope the developers take this into consideration: (1) Make imported images moveable like the text! I noticed that once you import an image and edit it the first time, you cannot go back to edit it for the second, third, or fourth time. I am constantly editing my notes to study and not being able to move around the image when I come to study the next day is frustrating. (2) There’s also a scrolling problem I face daily as I use the app to take notes in class using an apple pencil. The page gets stuck and I can no longer scroll up or down and have to restart the app to get it to work again. It’s a minor bug but it can be frustrating when it happens while I am in a hurry to copy down notes in class. Thank you.

Awful. I can’t believe I paid for this app, I thought it would be better than Microsoft one note because of how heavily marketed it is by other students on YouTube etc. The notes crash all the time, and PDFs go blank so my writing is there but the PDF is gone. And the online version is different and you have to pay and half the time the notes don’t even sync.

This use. To be a fantastic app. Now I'm using Apple Books as it allows me to work and listen to an audiobook or music. The Notability app has a negative effect on all audio.

Very good but missing convenience. I use it for notes all the time but I’d really love a two finger tap to undo and three finger tap to redo instead of the tiny little button up top

Too bad for existing users. They betrayed all the users who supported them in the past years. I won’t use it any more. Greedy company!

Good app, but ARE YOU SERIOUS?. 😡😡I can’t believe this is happening, I paid for this app already and now I have to subscribe it just because you made it free now????? It doesn’t even make sense, I bought this app already you can’t start charging me just because you made it free now😡😡😡

The dev double dips. Why am I paying for text to speech and stickers and math Functionability when I already purchased the app. STOP DOUBLE DIPPING Don’t buy this one note is free and far superior

Freemium. Absolutely terrible

Good job freemium. That’s why Good notes are on sale now

Disappointing. Can’t believe they turned it into a subscription service. Why would you pay more for this app while the other one is just as good plus it’s cheaper? GoodNotes didn’t cheat their users like notability.

Battery drain issue!. Please fix the battery drain issue asap! This happened since the update of IPadOS. The battery just drains 20% within an hour use!

Variable Palm Detection is Extremely Annoying. Look, I like this app. The organizational features and the ability to back-up to google drive is a lifesaver. However, one thing that I absolutely HATE is the broken palm detection. Essentially, every now and then, I’ll be writing a sentence and randomly drawn, straight lines will appear on the screen. I’d go back and worth with the native notes app to ensure it wasn’t just the iPad that was acting up (which it wasn’t). I also tried lifting my palm off the screen while I was writing, to see if it would fix the issue (which it did, but it is completely impractical to write that way). All-in-all, I like this app when it’s NOT jittery and writes the way it’s supposed to, would definitely give 5 stars but this is just the worst.

why?. let my money back, trash company

Split Screen the same note. Love the app, would love the ability to open 2 pages of the same note on split screen. This would really improve my workflow rather than scrolling back and forth between two pages from the same note. Thanks,

Bait and Switch. The developers of this app are literal scum. They create an app that they charge up front for and then decide arbitrarily that they are going to void that (whilst keeping your money) and change to subscription based platform. DO NOT BUY. You have been warned.

Awful Business practice. With the recent announcement of switching to a subscription based app, this app has just lost all credibility. I paid full price for this all to access its features and software fully. A one time payment plain and simple. You can guarantee that I will not continue with a subscription. Off to look for a new note taking up!

Fraud. I just paid for the app, and now you said that I should pay monthly after a year! This is a total fraud! You never mentioned we need to pay monthly!

Another app falling to the subscription model. Adios.

👉 Are you looking for an Adsense alternative advertising platform?

Adsterra is the most preferred ad network for those looking for an alternative to AdSense. Adsterra is the ideal choice for new sites with low daily traffic. In order to advertise on the site in Adsterra, like other ad networks, a certain traffic limit, domain age, etc. is required. There are no strict rules. Sign up!

New update is awful!. Please change it back. This new update is awful. Makes me not want to use the app anymore. I use it every day I pay for the most expensive subscription and I’m so upset about this update. It looks sleek but it lost all functionality. I hate the new bar with the pens it absolutely awful and hard to use. The previous one was perfect and so simple please bring it back not need to change something that was already so good just for change sake. Also new new version doesn’t let me edit the created time on my documents. I like this feature because it allows me to organize my notes better if I download a pdf later on because I forgot but I want to have it in a certain order. It doesn’t have the star anymore for the colors so I can’t organize my pens and highlights in a way that is more convenient to me. The app is so hard to use now specially if you are like me and need different highlights and pen colors. Please listen to the costumers and at least put back the original bar, it truly was a costumer favorite. The new one is really awful and was not designed for functionality but just designed for looks. And just because something it’s pretty it Dosent mean it works.

Best thing ever.. I’m about to become a published author bc I wrote a book called “I see Colors” that has a bunch of other sequel books like “Call Me Dyslexia” “Perfect Party” “Autumn Rain” “Drip” “Her, You, I, Me, Them” “Wish on a thousand stars” “Moonlight” “Denim” “Normal” and probably more. At the time of writing this, none of these are made yet, but I know what they will be about. Thank you for everything. This is from deep in my heart. I have no complaints. I love u!! Anyway, each book teaches important lessons. “Call Me Dyslexia” teaches about how life is with dyslexia. Perfect Party teaches about how laughter is the best medicine. Autumn Rain teaches about the life and inner thoughts of a person with a friend that has autism. Drip teaches about the importance of mental health and depression and anxiety. Denim teaches about how it doesn’t matter about what people think of you, it matters of what u think ur self. Her you I me and them teaches about pronouns and how people are different. Wish on a thousand star is how things get better over time and Moonlight is about friends and the importance of loyalty.

WHAT?. I haven’t been paying much attention to update when suddenly I realize that my Notability App is awesomely different. I have been a long time user of this app and have loved it since day one. I have experimented with other note taking apps but very quickly return to this workhorse of an app. Now with the latest update I am blown away! I love to write with my apple pen and being able to convert to text is extremely useful. So far it has been flawless in conversion; however I am old school in my penmanship so that my work in my favor. Being able to put notes side by side? Since I convert all documents into files in Notability for meetings, to be able to pull up other documents alongside of the notes I am taking is absolutely amazing. One thing that I am watching and am unsure of yet is that in watching battery consumption Notability seems to have suddenly become my primary drain, outstripping my FaceBook app. So this is something that I will be watching since I tend to leave Notability running in the background. But overall I want to give a big shout of thanks to the developers for making a great app even better.

Suggestions for Developers. There are some missing features that hold it back from 5 stars: 1) When I take notes and annotate, I like to have multiple pens and highlighters out. There should be an option to add additional pens and highlighters to the toolbar. When rapidly taking notes, time is precious, and this would make it less tedious. 2) inserting diagrams is too difficult. There should be a math or shape mode that you can toggle on and off that auto recognizes shapes and fixes them. Having an math text mode that auto recognizes math notation would also be fantastic ... p.s. OneNotes version of this is poorly executed. 3)**** when I record lectures, I am always slightly behind when note taking. If there were an advanced feature where we could choose where the audio track lines up with the notes, that would be spectacular. Revisited notes would be much superior and would be more like sitting through the lecture again.**** 4) there should be an option to directly add in PDFs to our notes. They could be added in as entire pages to the document, just integrating the PDF, or auto convert to an image to be pasted in. But working with PDFs in existing notes should be an option.

This is the one -You can stop looking now, get Notability. I’m a scientist, back in school, going to grad school soon. I spent whatever it took to check out all of the notes apps, and Notability is the best. I can record a lecture or seminar, while I’m taking notes, I can draw molecular structures, I can import PowerPoint slides and annotate them. If my page/slide is pretty crowded, I can create a “sticky” and take notes on it, and I can move it around when I need to see what is under it. I have made entire multimedia presentations with this app. You can save your page as a PDF, or I’ll even just take a screenshot of what I want to present or turn in, crop the margins, and use that. I can have sections of slides and book pages, or a picture of a handout, then work the problem out with my Apple Pencil, and turn it all in as one convenient PDF or pic I can email to my professors. The interface is much more flexible than Microsoft apps, and plays better with other apps and platforms. Seriously, I use the crap out of this thing. I checked out all of the common note apps, and this one is just more capable and adaptable than any of the others. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Notes deleting as I am writing them. I have been using notability for the past two years on my iPad. I am a person who loves to hand write their notes, so I usually take notes with my Apple Pencil. This issue has never happened to me before, but while I was in a class taking some notes, I went to a different notebook to check on something and when I went back to the notes I was taking for my class a certain portion of the notes deleted. So I quickly rewrote the notes since they were still fresh in my mind. Then I went to my home screen and then back on to the notability app the section of notes that were deleted had been deleted again! There was also no way for me to undo this. I do not know what happened to what I wrote, but of course when I was writing out meaningless sentences to see if this problem would persist, those were staying. This is really sad to me because I have loved notability and using it with my Apple Pencil. After this though, I am not sure that I am able to trust that my notes won’t be deleted again. Being in college, there are many times where I cannot review the information from my lectures, which is why this is a problem. If I had reviewed this app before this incident, I would have given it 4 or 5 stars, but unfortunately this is no longer the case.

Added Subscription service to an app I already paid for. I’ve been using notability since 2016. I’ve loved the east user interface, flexible backup options, and overall range of features. I even liked it enough to pay for BOTH the iOS and Mac versions. A year ago I would’ve easily rated it 4+ stars and was recommending it to other students for digital notes. Now, though, I can no longer recommend it in good conscience. I am EXTREMELY disappointed in recent changes, especially the decision to add a paid subscription service to a program that I already paid to use. New app features are entirely locked behind the extra subscription. If this was a free application I wouldn’t mind the subscription—I would even expect it. But on an app that was supposed to be a single purchase? No. That’s just greed. Recent updates have also resulted in much poorer app performance on both mobile and Mac versions. The performance now is far worse than it was a year ago, and even falls behind Notability’s performance in 2016! Really sad that the devs have decided to be greedy over maintaining what was originally a great quality app. I hope the devs will listen to the feedback about their stupid subscription service and poor performance, but unfortunately I doubt they will…

I can see why this is #1. Honestly, I was really debating on whether on not I should use Notability to take my notes or if I should use GoodNotes 5. In the end, I ended up getting both just to try them out, and what I found was that the UI for Notability was almost flawless for me. Being able to record audio on here is great, but I think the biggest factor for me was how it felt like writing notes in this app. It’s literally feels like I am just writing on paper. My handwriting on Goodnotes 5 just seemed messier and I noticed that they would try to alter my handwriting a bit. If I could make some suggestions, it would be nice if the highlighter could go under the words rather than over it. I would also love the option to just automatically switch back to pen mode after using the eraser (Useful tool in goodnotes). There would be times where I’m writing and the app doesn’t register it and would momentarily freeze a bit. But these are minor inconveniences. Overall, this is a great app to take notes on and annotate PDFs (what I mainly do). The partial eraser is amazing and the automatic backup is a extremely convenient. Definitely recommend it for college!

Best college note taking app but could be better. Overall, this is a great app! Especially for importing and in class note taking, but when it comes to studying, it could be better. 1. I want to have multiple favorites pallets to create and choose from. 2. I want to be able to write on the tape and tap it to then see what’s under the tape without my writing being over the text. Basically have my writing on the tape and maybe double tap the tape to make it easier to use. Overall, the tape is a good idea but the execution could be better. 3. And most importantly, develop a note card part of your app. This is the best note taking app so it would be great if y’all could incorporate a digital written notecard format. There is not a single notecard app that is remotely easy to use and also has written text. Basically, this is a huge part of the market y’all are missing out on and I’m taking Orgo next semester and NEED YALL TO MAKE NOTECARDS. That way students can have everything in one place. And for those of you who read this and say I should use Quizlet, I have, and they don’t have a written cards option. Thanks love y’all

New Update — Not Good. I have been using Notability for a while now, and I have absolutely loved it so far. I use it for all of my school note taking. I can have all of my notes in one place rather than having to carry multiple notebooks. However, there has been a new update, and I honestly cannot even enjoy taking notes anymore. For starters, they added line stabilization to the writing tools on the option that shows pressure difference/line weight (there’s now an option for no pressure difference/line weight difference). It is awful, to be frank. I wish there was a way to turn it on and off, because I am sure it is useful for drawing, but the majority of people using this app are students who are writing and taking notes. It makes writing really frustrating and unnatural. They also added a sliding bar feature for picking pen size, and it is inconvenient. The old way of choosing pen size showed how big it was going to be. Now I have to slide through and try writing to know what size it is. They added a pencil though, so that’s cool. Pen is ruined though. I hope they fix these issues soon, because it looks like a lot of people are not enjoying the update. For now, I will be typing my notes and looking at other app alternatives.

Horrible app - my experience as a current med student. I have been using the app the past year for medical school and could not be more dissatisfied/frustrated. The app frequently crashes while I am taking notes, resulting in notes not being saved. I often find myself rewriting notes that I had just written prior to the app crashing. In addition the app is constantly glitching - I will try to write something with my Apple pen and it takes a good minute before I can produce any sort of ink on paper. I also have issues copying and pasting images onto First Aid from outside resources. And as of most recently, I can no longer search keywords on first aid, which completely defeats the purpose of having a pdf copy of First Aid. I have reached out to Notability by submitting a request of my current issues and have not heard back from them. Unfortunately I cannot contact them via phone and thus I am extremely frustrated with the lack of accessibility and availability to receive any sort of help. Do yourself a favor and do not download this app. I have been informed by my colleagues that OneNote is significantly better and i wish I had known this prior to using notability

Favorite App for school/work. I love this app so much. I have used it all through college and now at work. I went to school for surgical technology. I was able to put each class in its own subject then subdivide into class chapter/exams. I can upload class PowerPoints and take notes directly on them with the Apple Pencil while using the record function. Then later I can listen back on the lecture while watching myself take notes in real time. This is especially helpful when there is so much content and like being in class a second time. Now that I am working in my field I have been using with app to categorize specialty’s by surgery. I can upload pictures of my surgical set ups and take notes of procedures all on the same document which is fantastic. The only reason I am not giving it 5 stars is because I cannot add videos to my documents. I could really use this when I am leaning new equipment and set ups so I can watch it later and take notes on it. Otherwise this app has been my saving grace and I RECOMMEND it all the time. I just want that video option lol.

App Overhaul: A Love-Hate Story. No! I'm sorry, but I find this new setup to be very unsatisfactory. I used to love this app because it was perfectly fine, but now it seems like everything has been unnecessarily changed. I can't even find my favorite pens anymore, and the box for the pens just gets in the way without disappearing. I don't understand why something that wasn't broken needed fixing. Additionally, there's too much black empty space at the top of the notes, and switching between pens takes more steps than before. The home screen font is unattractive, and I'm not sure why you decided to alter things like this. On the positive side, I do appreciate that all features are now free for premium users, but the changes made to the app seem excessive and unnecessary. Even recording now requires extra steps, which is frustrating. I have respect for the team behind the app, but it feels like you went overboard with this update. And the date and time is missing!! The absence of date and time at the bottom of the subject is crucial for my business. It's frustrating to see this vital feature missing, and I strongly urge you to revert to the previous version. Offering the option to choose between the old and new version would be a reasonable compromise, as the current update is significantly flawed and unsatisfactory.

One major flaw that ruins the app for me. I've used this app for several years now and have loved it on the whole. Cross-platform user interface and Drive and iCloud backup were a major plus. Customer service is also pretty quick. However, the lack of native landscape orientation is a dealbreaker for me. I was aware of this issue when I first purchased the app but thought that the developers would eventually address it, and I thought that I could find an easy workaround in the meantime. This app has been out for a decade yet they still haven't created this feature. Every time it's brought up, the developers offer a "fix" which you can download a landscape template into your document—as a medical student who lives off this app, it takes far too long to find the exact paper I want in a high quality file to duplicate whenever I want to write in landscape format. The developers' failure to address this problem with any real solution shows that despite frequent bug fixes, they have no intention of providing answers to real requests or problems customers have. Unfortunately, I will be migrating to a different note-taking app and will no longer be recommending this to my classmates in any professional or graduate program.

Great app but could be improved for teaching. I gladly bought this app as I use it to teach University classes. It allows me to write with my ApplePencil while projecting my notes from the iPad, so after every lecture I have an editable version of the notes and I can produce a PDF. Also, I can include multimedia contents, and images from the web. However I found difficult importing external PDF in an open note as a page, and if this is the first page I cannot remove it anymore. Also, the app could be improved with a couple of very helpful additions: 1) to re-use the notes the following academic year, I would like to be able to “hide” part of the notes, to “unhide” one line at a time as I explain the notes; 2) an even better option would be to be able to create a greyed-out version of the notes in order to re-write on them during the class, i.e. as if I was writing for the first time. A found a workaround using semi-transparent boxes to overlay to the notes, but now this feature seemed gone with the latest updates, which is disappointing since updates shoul “add” and not remove features. I hope someone from the developing team is reading these reviews .

The Best App You Will Ever Purchase!. I know for starters this app may seem like a lot, especially with the cost for both the iPhone/iPad and the cost of the Mac apps, BUT ITS WORTH IT! Being a college student I use this app every single day in all my classes. The app is so easy to use, and so intuitive. The iPad app is amazing for use with Apple Pencil or other styluses, and the fun pen colors and paper choices make notes less boring. This app also works with TONS of file types which you can import and annotate. I have nor used the voice feature yet, but I am thrilled to as I am sure it is as good as everything else this app offers. Finally my favorite feature is that notability automatically saves all my files and updates them constant across all my devices, so I never have to wait for my files to load. The useful feature of backing up the notes to google drive or Dropbox is amazingly helpful and lets me have my notes accessible even when I am not on my own laptop with the app. Overall MUST BUY for college students especially, or anyone who is a frequent note taker or writer. Absolutely, 100%, hands down, the most amazing app on the App Store!!

A great product and indispensable productivity tool. I've had Notability for several years but switched to NoteShelf + and used it for a couple of years. But I would always come back and take a look at Notability. I love the way it handles text. It flows naturally into the handwritten text, just like an actual document. With this last update, Notability fixed everything that made me hesitant to use it as my primary note taking and document organization tool. I love the divider within a divder update, it was on my wishlist. As for the subscrition model, my first knee jerk reaction was, "what after all these years now I have to pay" it took about 5 minutes to get over that, I'm just surprised they were able to hold out this long. At $11 to $14 a year this is a bargain and it provides them the resource to continue to develoep new features. I was in software develeope, for larage scale commerical applications and we switche to a subscription model in the 80's. I get it and I apploud them for the more than resonable price.

The older version would have received 5 stars from me…. I used notability all throughout college, my masters, and into the completion of my doctoral program- needless to say I was a loyal follower and recommended notability to everyone. However, I will be canceling my subscription before it renews in September. The update is ATROCIOUS. It’s ugly, it requires more steps to access tools, the lecture recordings get mashed together, the toolbar is a nuisance, and again- it’s so ugly! The older version of notability was perfect, the toolbar was easily accessible, the highlight and eraser tool had more than THREE sizes. Honestly, how is taking AWAY sizes an upgrade? That’s a DOWNGRADE. I bought the colored themes so my app could be a beautiful pink color but now it’s all grey..with an ugly pink tint you can only see for a second before it all looks grey again- a cop out because they knew they could not take away a feature people paid extra for. Also, to me, the app seems more crowded and overwhelming which is the opposite of the intended “sleekness” effect I assume the developers wanted to execute. Who approved this? It’s absolutely appalling. I turned automatic updates off on my other iPad before it could change- I’m so thankful I got to it before it automatically updated. Good luck losing thousands of loyal subscribers. SMH

This is a great app UNTIL.... This is a great app UNTIL... you need to contact customer support. After the last update I ran into an issue with my computers not syncing my notes. I sent them an email in March - no response, then again in June - no response. The only response I received was an auto-generated message both times that said, "Thank you for contacting us! At the moment, we're experiencing a higher than usual volume of inquiries and responses may take longer than expected. We appreciate your patience and are working to get back to you as quickly as possible. Your ticket number is..." I then sent another email with the subject line, "Still haven't heard back after 5 months and 2 months respectively" which included the previous ticket numbers citing the same issue. THEN I got a response 8 days later letting me know my options to correct the issue. So glad I had the Classic version of this app. I doubt that I would ever upgrade to the subscription. If I were paying a subscription price, I would have canceled and went back to Evernote (for a much better customer service experience).

Completely Unusable With Apple Pencil. This app use to be great. I used it for 6 years in college taking notes. The app use to do a great job of rejecting your palm so you can lean on the tablet screen to write. There were no problems. Now the palm rejection feature is useless. It is impossible to use the apple pencil with this app. Every time I go to write a sentence multiple problems occur. First, the app thinks I want to paste something so a box pops up that disrupts your writing. Second, sometime it scrolls up or down the page when writing making it very frustrating to write. And lastly sometimes it completely glitches out and draws all over the screen. The problem became so bad that I ended up buying a new Apple Pencil 2 and this did not fix the problem. Some workarounds that I have found is importing screenshots instead of copy and pasting them so the app doesn’t think you want to move the picture, clearing your copy/paste, and not resting your palm on the screen which is close to impossible. Its a shame because I use this app almost everyday and I have all my notes saved in their cloud. I have no choose but to use another app to take notes but it’s frustrating not having all my notability notes on the different app. So PLEASE fix problem.

Terrible Updated Version. I am a doctorate level student and have used notability for the past year. I loved the app and how convenient is was when it came to be being organized for each of my classes, as well as the easy access to all of the features. However, since the latest update, I am constantly agitated. Before I could easily look something up from a previous class to refresh my memory on a topic, but now I have to do a general search, filter the file that I am looking for, and then use the search engine again to search a PowerPoint presentation. I also like to record my professors while they lecture so if I happen to miss something I could easily go back and listen to the recording while studying. Now, I can not record more than a hour and seven minutes. Mind you, I’m in a doctorate program and some of our PowerPoint pdf files contains anywhere up to 450 slides because we use that slide for the whole quarter. Before the update I could record more than 5 hours of lecture in my two hour classes that met twice a week. I really hate how the latest update ruined this what used to be precious app. Now I feel like I am being setup for failure. Everything has changed and I hate it!

I wish I didn’t pay for this. I downloaded notability in January after getting fed up with one notes and Microsoft, and at first I thought it was a really good choice. I didn’t like that in good notes, I would have to buy before I try, even though I ended up getting the notability subscription (btw you can’t really not subscribe…). However, I am absolutely fed up with this app. I can barely write ANY notes without the entire page glitching. I get these awful random lines that scribble across the whole page and mess up so much of my writing that I’m constantly undoing or erasing spastic lines that I didn’t intend to create. It’s really difficult as a student trying to take notes in a college lecture and not being able to write more than a word before the page messes up. I’ve tried every possible solution for this online, from turning on tap to zoom, toggling with palm detection, un pairing and re pairing my Apple Pencil, freaking everything yet none have worked. The app has had multiple updates since I got it yet it seems like this is one problem they’ll never fix. Do yourself a favor and just get good notes, this ISN’T WORTH IT

Syncing doesn’t work well. I waste so much time trying to get my iPad Notability to sync with my MacBook Notability that I’m looking for alternatives. It’s just not reliable and when it decides not to work, I waste a lot of time trying to get it to sync. I use my iPad as my portable notebook and then need to copy/paste things from my MacBook into Notability once it syncs. When it syncs, I can watch my handwritten notes appear on the MacBook in seconds after I write them on my iPad. However, when syncing is being stubborn (which it is most of the time), I go through multiple reboots of both devices, starting and stopping iCloud syncing manually and even using the Airdrop workaround to try to get syncing to start again. There’s no specific thing that works, sometimes Airdropping a screen capture from one device to the other restarts the syncing, sometimes it takes a full reboot of both devices and sometimes nothing works and I just walk away in frustration. It’s great when it works, but most of the time it doesn’t. I experience this issue every time (most often multiple times) while I’m using both devices. I am careful not to cause conflicts between device versions, so when syncing decides to stop working, I’m prevented from using the app until syncing decides to work again.

The updates ruin the app. There was an update a while ago that got rid of the page break option. Because there’s no option to add page breaks now, it makes working with pdfs really hard. When I submit assignments that I’ve worked on in notability, I get points off because of my formatting now. It breaks up the text and there’s 0 indication of the page difference. Please bring back the page break or create an option to add it. Additionally, notability absolutely kills my battery now. Before these updates came my battery would last for 9 hours straight and I’d have some battery left over. Now, it drains 20% of my battery in less than an hour. I was in a course that met 9 hrs 2 days a week and we’d go through more than 300 slides each day. Now, I go to class 2-4 hours a day, with probably 50 slides I go through per day, and it kills my battery. Sure, maybe notability is scanning the pages I’ve added, but in the past I’ve added hundreds of slides at a time and it never affected my battery in as noticeable way. The app is good, I love using it for school and it’s very user friendly, but they need to create an option for formatting like they had in the past and fix their battery issue.

Subscription plan is a deal breaker. **update: they changed their minds and with version 11.0.2 previously paid users will keep their purchased features forever. However I’m changing to a three-star rating because while notability is a great app easily worth, say, $20 (more than I’ve paid), it is not really worth $15/year. I’m also leaving my original review in place because it’s pretty clear that they tried to screw their paid users and only changed their minds when they realized they couldn’t get away with it due to the huge number of 1-star reviews.** Original review: I’ve been very happy with notability, and last month purchased several features from the Notability shop. But now they have switched to a subscription model, and if I read correctly, they will take away the features I just paid for in one year if I don’t pay them more money for a subscription. This is a betrayal of trust and is absolutely unacceptable. There are other products almost (but not quite) as good as the new subscription version that are much better deals. The hobbled free version of notability is not as good as free alternatives.

Great app, so close to Awesome. I really like how easy it is to use, find notes, and search within notes (handwriting recognition is amazing!) The layout is really intuitive and there are plenty of qualities that make it really friendly for school and work notes (recoding function of course, but also the shape detection, being able to import and export files between app is such an amazing function, and enough color customizing/options but not too much to be overwhelming). What it lacks is a better organization system. Right now, it’s like binder dividers, and while that is superficially nice, I’d like to be able to nest my documents, or at least be able to quickly visually recognize them with an icon or “cover page.” Additionally I really want to be able to change the page layouts for individual pages within a file. It is so frustrating to have to have to keep switching back and forth between layouts because my needs change within the file. There are other competitor apps of course, that have either own features and deficiencies, so for now we’ll see how long I stay with this as my main note taking app.

Obsessed.... but have to fix some recent glitches. My favorite app ever- changed my life while trying to juggle my crazy workload in grad school (I use it with my iPad so I can take notes with the Apple Pencil directly onto my slides)- amazing! The only thing though as of recently, Notability keeps freezing/unexpectedly quitting on me (I guess since the newest update?!). Luckily, other than losing a few seconds-minutes of recordings in class while trying to get the app back on, all material is recovered. However, it’s extremely frustrating and a nuisance when trying to obviously be productive. Also, there HAS to be a way for the developer to find a way to select/copy multiple pages at once, I can’t understand how that’s still not a tool on Notability at this point in time.... This is probably my biggest frustration with the app, because I need to transfer or delete 1+ slides pretty frequently (sometimes 50+ !!) and it makes it soo time consuming to do individually(not to mention, recently, ends up freezing and quitting while doing so!). With a few more updates this app will be EVEN MORE AMAZING!

New UI really missed the mark. I used to really like Notability, and use it extensively for school: taking notes in class, marking up lecture slides, doing homework and planning. One of my favorite things was the ability to put your favorite tools (specific colors and strokes) in a row on the edge where they were handy but unobtrusive, and you could easily move it around to whatever part of the edge you wanted. Now, right before school started in fall of 2023, they released a major update that all their users had to try to figure out real fast. At first I was like, “whatever, I’ll get used to it soon”, but I quickly discovered that several critical features were gone. These include the favorite tools, favorite colors, and the ability to move the favorites bar anywhere on the edge, not limited to four spots like it is now! Words cannot express how lame this update is. The dumb floating buttons are way more obtrusive than the old fixed menu bar at the top. Literally the only positive thing I can say about it is that I can use the ruler tool now, whereas they wanted me to subscribe before. It was a 5 star app before, and I really hope Ginger Labs listens to the many people who are unhappy about this downgrade of an update.

I tried so hard to give the new update a chance!. I’ve been a loyal Notability user for the better part of the last 7 years. After purchasing an iPad 7 years ago, I was on the hunt for a note-taking app. I tried Evernote, Goodnote, and notability. I ended up choosing notability for a variety of features that the others didn’t have. This new update has removed almost all of them. My favorite feature was the zoom feature. Although you can still access it by holding down the screen, the zoom window no longer has the controls attached to it, and the “move” buttons obstruct the writing area. The arrows to jump to the next page have also disappeared. This has been a huge inconvenience and has greatly impacted my work/study flow. I am also very unsatisfied with the placement of the pen controls, as it gets in the way of my document. I have read several recent reviews and by large, everyone is has issues with this new update. I waited a few weeks to write this review, in case I had somehow grown to like or become accustomed to the changes, however they continue to be disruptive and distracting even weeks later. I am super frustrated with this update and I hope notability can listen to its thousands of unhappy users and enact some sort of change.

Still using every day five years later. My favorite thing is having one long infinite vertical space to write to. I can easily scroll down, or use the side bad to find a specific page. Searching is easy. Pen selection is my favorite across apps (use the short cut tab)with pen size and color selection quick and intuitive.I have a work tab with several different documents and a home tab. Its nice to go to my home tab and select taxes and see my notes from last year’s meeting say, or anytime I research something, its there waiting for me. Oh doctor’s office visits, all right there scrolling up through years of in office visit notes. For work I have a Daily log, for just writing, then specific docs. It syncs between my devices easily. I am waiting for a web based version so I can cut and paste directly from my work windows machine into my pages. Thats my biggest disconnect right now. I use OneNote at work for a lot, but I would use notability more if I could. I keep trying other programs here and ther, but nothing ever competes with the simpliticity and joy of note taking that Notability has.

Possibly the greatest application for students. Notability changed the game for me, I never even think about printing lecture slides and wasting paper. This is a must have for students, it allows you to essentially write on any pdf/ppt. You can even import images into your notes which makes it useful if I want to take a picture of something or even a screenshot of my textbook and import it. Also has tools for recording voice if you want to record a lecture and associate it with a particular note. Handy system for organizing and color coding topics/folders. Even syncs with most major cloud data services like google drive, Dropbox, etc. Tools to markup your notes are pretty intuitive and easy to use, has lots of useful tools to choose from. It’s very easy to study even if I don’t have my iPad since I can open this on my iPhone and everything syncs. Has a computer app too which costs more but it’s super easy to just airdrop notability notes to your laptop and open them there. I would highly recommend this if you intend to use your iPad for school.

Absolutely the best note taking app for iPad. I’ve been using this app for 6 years, all throughout high school and into my sophomore year of college. It is honestly the best app I’ve ever used for notes. It’s so easy to convert notes to PDFs and import almost any type of file, even pictures! It’s also great for writing, and I love that they have a left handed mode for all of us lefties. It makes it so much easier to write. There are also different types of paper that you can use to personalize your notes! The latest update allows you to view 2 notes at the same time, and you can write on one while recording the other! Definitely the best feature for me! The only things I would want to change is to add more colors and themes. The selection is already great of both, but I am a little bored with having to use the same selection over and over. I also think an improvement would be to let people create folders within folders or subjects. This would help me further organize my notes. Honestly though, I love everything about this app!

Notability Update Destroys Functionality. I am a medical student who has been using Notability for quite some time. It has been very, useful and I used to love it. The favorites tool bar was the most useful part of this app as I could have multiple different pens and highlighters with the newest update they removed that. The new toolbar has much less customization, and it almost always gets in your way. You also have to tap on the tool you’re going to use and then you can change the color and then you have to tap the tool once again to get the toolbar to get out of your way ginger labs if you are reading this I really hope you will bring the favorites toolbar back and allow us to remove this new tool bar or move it at least to the side. Also, if we must keep this new tool bar, please have it snug with the side that it’s on, rather than having a gap on both sides of the toolbar. Otherwise I will most likely have to move on to another option. This is not just my opinion as I have many colleagues using your app heard a single positive comment since the new update. This app was a 5 star before the update but unfortunately it has brought the score down significantly.

Program hangs, a lot. There is so much to love about this app, but I cannot get past the point that it’s primary purpose is to be a note taker, and, when being used for it’s primary purpose, it hangs. A lot. When you are in the middle of taking notes, and the software freezes, you have to stop taking notes, you have to stop paying attention to what is being said or shown on the PowerPoint presentation, and you have to attend to your notetaking program which won’t let you take notes. You end up missing significant chunks of what you purchased the app to help you chronicle in the first place. Sometimes the hang resolves after a minute or so of doing nothing. Other times the only way I can get Notability to work again is to power off my iPad and power it back on. This, of course, takes so long that it is intolerably intrusive. I am running Notability on a new 2018 iPad Pro with the latest software update. Again, if your main purpose is for taking notes during a lecture or a meeting or a conversation, you cannot rely on this program.

If my iPad could only have 1 app, this would be it. I don’t take time to write many reviews, but I have to take a minute to throw a bone to the most used app on my iPad Pro. The design of this app is perfect for me. It has exactly the features I need—I use just about every feature it has (nothing seems superfluous or overly complex), yet there are also no other features that I feel it really lacks. It is just a really solid, well-designed notes app. I think where it really excels is how easy it is to import all kinds of visual materials, take notes all over them, and synchronize recordings with the note taking. I draft patent applications and being able to import an invention disclosure and have synchronized note-taking while I go over the document with the inventor is extremely useful. I have found lots of fun and useful things to do on my iPad Pro, but the app I use most, and the last one I would ever give up, is Notability. My compliments to the team for creating a great product and keeping it updated. Whatever I paid for this was worth every penny and much more.

Please bring the old Notability back. This new update changed everything and made it feel like I haven’t used this app for years when I have like around 2012. Also I really hate the floating toolbar like most have mentioned and also they completely removed the feature where you could zoom in with the box to hand write. This feature allowed me to write closely on one part of the document while still viewing the rest. Now I either have to zoom in to be able to write legible words and move it myself or try my best without zooming. The previous feature would move the writing area for you once you started writing in the blue area which was customizable. Please bring that back and a full toolbar at the top instead of a small floating one that’s annoying and in the way. I really dislike this update. I’ve felt to lost with it. I’m in a doctorate program and the old version was more reliable and honestly exactly what I and most people needed. I understand wanting a more aesthetic look but you can do that without changing everything. If my iPad didn’t auto-update it and had I known, I wouldn’t have even updated the app.

Almost Perfect. Hello, I hope you are well. Let me begin my telling you that Notability is my favorite and most important app. The interaction I’ve had with you has been great, and I believe that all of you at Ginger Labs are wonderful. However, I am limited in what I can do with Notability, because as the Tactical Operations Bureau Commander for a major American police department, leading SWAT, Bomb Squad, Crisis Negotiations, and Fugitive Appreciation operators, I cannot fully utilize Notability to its potential due to the lack of proper security. I respectfully request that you utilize the readily available Apple API’s and include Touch/Face ID and encrypt this otherwise wonderful app, so that those protecting America’s safety and freedom can carry the sensitive information on our iOS devices that we need to. 8 out of 10 apps on my iPhone and iPad have touch/face ID, so I don’t understand why the finest notes app available lags behind in this important feature. I would gladly pay for this feature, and I hope that you will add it sooner than later. This is far more important than the emoji search that was added in 8.1. Thank you for considering this request. Be well, be safe, and God Bless!

Doctoral level use. I have used notability for the past two years with great success. My recent qualm involves the newest update. You used to be able to do a search individually per subject, and per each item (while toggling back and forth through different documents)and it would highlight the matching terms in blue and save the place which was extremely helpful (especially when searching textbooks and hundreds of slides). They updated the system and now it is very hard to search overall thorough all the notes and the highlights are not apparent and the search function doesn’t work as efficiently as it used to. I really don’t like the product as much with these latest updates, which make the system much less responsive and less user friendly despite it being visually pleasing. Also, not a fan of the new favorites bar. I like it better with the star in the corner that I would add or take away and I loved the simplicity of the old options. I don’t want or need a pencil option. The functionality of this app is what keeps me using it and not good notes. Please don’t turn this into good notes.

Unparalleled Note-Taking App. I got this app when it was in the developmental stage and I loved it back then. I couldn’t even imagine the potential this app could have. Every single update brings amazement to my eyes. This is the simplest yet most amazing note taking app you could possibly ever hope for. I am currently college student and I can’t even begin to explain how this app has aided me in my academic journey. You can record lectures simultaneously while writing down notes and then go back and see exactly when the lecturer was talking when you wrote down a certain note. That in itself is amazing. Additionally, this app also allows you to search keywords for your handwriting (yes it’s even capable of reading terrible handwriting like mine). What else could you ask for in an app? This app does everything that you could ever want while taking notes, and then some. Overall, this app deserves much more than 5 stars and I want to personally thank the creators and developers for making this app a possibility and for aiding me in me academic career.

So Good but needs more color!. I love this app. I bought it years ago and never used it on my phone, but since getting an iPad it has become one of my most used apps both for work and for personal use. It works so well and I haven’t seen any glitches or issues with the features. I will say the color choices for paper backgrounds are lacking and I would really love to see some improvements there. We should be able to choose the background from a full spectrum color palette like the pens and highlighters. Yes you could use the highlighter to change the paper color, but it only changes the section of the page that is currently on the screen. When you scroll down to continue your note and try to highlight in the new background colors, you end up overlapping the previously colored areas and end up with sections that are discolored. More line templates, like for handwritten check lists would also be appreciated. I don’t care about the themes, I’m happy with black, but to be honest the paid options aren’t even remotely tempting. Not good choices.

Great app! But needs some improvements. I have been using this app for about 6 month now for college. It is extremely useful with my iPad Pro! I have been able to almost completely replace all my books, laptop and notebook. It is a super convenient app that will allow you to have everything you need to study on the go on any device with the app. Although this app is pretty reliable, I have two complaints that I would like for them to be resolved. First, when trying to import a pdf file from the internet to a note that has been already written, and selecting “add to another note” there is a bug that misplaces the categories of the notes, so the “easy way” for selecting the note goes away, and you’re left scrolling through all of your notes until you find the one you want. Also, it would be a great addition if one could have two notes open at the same time, because sometimes you need to see a note while copying on a blank one. These are two minor bugs that can be resolved easily, as the app is constantly being updated, so do not hesitate to buy this app. Its really useful.

New update is horrendous + company does not care about users. New update was a complete overhaul of the app that completely got rid of features everyone loved and made crucial functionality 3x harder to get to. Obviously did not consult with any user about their experience, it’s like they got bored and went “what if we change everything, just cause we can, without asking anyone!” Furthermore company has a track record of attempting to screw over their users. The app used to be a one-time purchase, but they switched to a subscription based model last year and attempted to force all their previous users who already paid for lifetime access to subscribe to maintain access to previous functionalities. It’s like if you bought your phone and paid it in full, and then apples goes “if you want to keep using it, you’ll have to pay $20 a month”. They reverted that decision only after intense backlash and clearly violating apples terms of service. Now they’ve received intense backlash for this awful update, but they are clearly censoring their users feedback in places like their subreddit (which they moderate) - posts complaining about the app get deleted. I guess it’s not surprising that only a company who doesn’t care about their users would roll out an update that is this blind to users needs.

Amazing Navigation and Design. I’m obsessed with this app. I use it on my iPad for all my classes, as well as creative projects, any readings I want to do, and regular note taking. I absolutely love the functionality and navigation. You can search your own handwriting (don’t have to convert it to text), can import and export files (images, screenshots, PDFs, MS Word, etc.) all with extreme ease (this works incredibly with airdrop). I also love being able to switch between notes, have multiple notes open on one screen, and having my favorite writing utensils saved as a toolbar. The backup/sync works very well. I absolutely love being able to cut out and move around/paste my handwriting, it makes super neat notes that are simple to organize and clean up if you do make mistakes while writing. All of this allows me to take notes instead of typing, with all the ease and perks of electronic files. The only thing I would like to see is an option to not layer the highlighter if you lift your pen. Other than that, this is essentially my entire office now.

Very frustrated with this new update. I loved the old version of this app, it was so nice to use for school, work, and personal organization. The new tool bar is not user friendly at all. I feel like I’m being forced to use someone else’s preferences. I do like the new brush that was added, but all of the brush size options were taken away. There were 12 brush sizes before this update and now there are 3?!??? Why would you get rid of all of those options. Now I have to either write with a brush that is too tiny or one that is way too big. And the highlighter brush sizes are all way too small when working with the size of my writing/ PowerPoints I downloaded for class. Why is there no size of the highlighter that can highlight what I’ve written on the lined page template???the lines are so far apart so I write big in them and then the highlighter can’t even highlight the whole word? Only half of it? What a stupid interface decision. I also hate the recommended brush colors. I don’t write in blue and red I use mostly custom colors so it’s just confusing and weird to have to look at those. The tool bar is very bulky now and takes up way to much of my screen it’s incredibly distracting. Overall super disappointing and now I just want to switch to a new app.

Want to love this app.. I have an issue with the automated grammar and spell check. I am writing notes in a different language for teaching purposes and I noticed that when I toggle off the automatic spelling and correction tabs, it still underlines all my words because its in a different language that Notability does not have on file. I went in and even went to settings to toggle off automatic underlining, but it still did not change the note that I am currently working on. Even after I did all the untoggling of the grammar and automated grammar stuff and preceded to type new sentences afterwords I got the same results!! It is really frustrating when you think you find an app that will better suit your needs as an online instructor teaching a different language. Sure I can do PDF of the sentences on another program then export it into notability, but why?? Your settings says I should be able to toggle the grammar and auto correction options, but it does nothing. Please help me with this fix.. I just purchased the subscription and now I am regretting it.

Excellent application, everyday usage by me. I’m an academic (astronomer), and as such, an integral part of my work involves paper and proposal revision, writing research notes, doing calculations, etc. When I decided to get an iPad to more efficiently do all this work, I thoroughly researched apps that could facilitate this work; that’s how I found this app. Notability allows you to do all of the above in an efficient and intuitive manner. You can easily share annotated documents, papers, calculations with other collaborators (eg, via email or cloud-based storage like Google Drive), organize your work documents, quickly access them —- basically, Notability made all that I needed and ever wanted from a tablet to happen. No more printed papers with annotations, no more scanning documents to sign them, no more ‘in which notebook did I derive my calculation’ —- all is well organized within the app. I thank the authors of the app for it! It has made my work much more efficient. In this pandemic era, I even use the app to share some live-calculations with students whenever needed (ie, use it like a whiteboard), and then I share the notes I created with them.

Each update is worse and you lose more functionality. TLDR: not worth your money, from a user of 2 years Each new update takes something away and they turned this app into a subscription, so you’re essentially paying more for less. I initially chose this app because you had so many options for writing, recording, and stickers, but the entire layout & tool section is worse now with no option to prevent the update. There are less tools and the functionality is worse. This is also terrible if you’re an artist. For example, Instead of several different options for stylus size as in the past, there are now only 3 and none of them match the formatting of the last 2 years of notes and minutes that I have for work and school. Nothing looks coordinated and it’s all sloppy looking. I paid more for colored themes, but with the new update the color changes are barely visible. The aesthetics are destroyed and the downloadable templates barely download properly. Did I mention you have to buy templates on top of a subscription because they are not included? This app was great two years ago when I first bought it, but ever since it switched to subscription based, it went downhill.

Used your app since 2014, but will be migrating to a different one now. I have been using your app since 2014. The functionality, the way of taking notes was fantastic. But the minute you made the decision to screw over all of the paid users on November 2nd 2021, trying to take away already paid features and to turn it into a subscription platform, you have lost my trust but also breached a contract in purchase. People who bought your app at a certain point were made the promise this would be a lifetime feature, and you thinking it would be okay to take it away with offering a meager one year free subscription is just beyond nonsense. I will not be returning to your app, nor will I be making any more notes in this app. Now I will have to worry whether you will find other ways to scam users, and I do not feel safe having my notes stored in this app as things may change. I have already completed migrating my notes. You do not deserve the loyalty of so many consumers who have trusted your app. Even though the developers decided not to take away features to already paid users (motives of which is also highly questionable since it is against apple policy), you guys didn’t even apologize. Its the worst business move. You lost one more user today.

App is Broken, Try Something Else. There is a problem with this app that makes it unusable that they have ignored and refused to fix for months at this point. There have been numerous updates since this bug started, and I’ve seen countless reviews mentioning the same issue, yet those reviews never seem to get a response from the developers. When switching the color of the pen, or when trying to switch from any tool to another tool, the app suddenly ignores the toolbar, and whichever tool you have selected will just go through the toolbar. Meaning, if you have the eraser selected, and you try to tap the pen, the eraser will just erase whatever is under the pen, while not switching to the pen. So you tap again and again, while it erases everything under the toolbar, then you close the app (because this is the only way to fix the problem), and when you reopen it, your notes have ton of stuff erased and now you can’t undo the erasing because you closed the app to fix the problem. Do not waste your money with this pile of garbage. This app used to be fantastic, it’s now completely useless, and the developers have abandoned fixing this problem. I don’t have any hope that they’ll fix this problem anymore. Seriously, do not give a cent to these incompetent developers.

new update 14.0 is less than ideal. I have been using Notability for two year now and have LOVED it so much since the beginning. I’ve recommended this app to so many people and I feel terrible that they are now stuck with this UI. Until this last update. They took away key features and tools that make note taking so much easier. They took away the favorites bar that allowed you to switch between the pens and highlighters that you use constantly. It’s now embedded into the main task bar that is obstructing the view of your work. It’s clunky and terrible. You use to be able to move between your favorites and the pen color you needed for the moment, now you have to create a new pen for it, aka disrupting your presets. They moved the undo button to the OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN which disrupts easy notetaking from before. You can’t move the tool bar as much as you could before and all the tools are so hidden inside of layers its terrible. Please notability, don’t become goodnotes. Now some positives, the new aesthetic is adorable, you just downgraded heavily on the accessibility and quickness you had previously. Please I’m begging, go back to the old tool bar and BRING BACK THE FAVORITES BAR. Please.

Please wait! Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF app comments loading...

Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF 14.7 Tips, Tricks, Cheats and Rules

What do you think of the Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF app? Can you share your complaints, experiences, or thoughts about the application with Ginger Labs and other users?

notability: notes, audio, pdf iphone images 1
notability: notes, audio, pdf iphone images 2
notability: notes, audio, pdf iphone images 3
notability: notes, audio, pdf iphone images 4
notability: notes, audio, pdf ipad images 1
notability: notes, audio, pdf ipad images 2
notability: notes, audio, pdf ipad images 3
notability: notes, audio, pdf ipad images 4

Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF 14.7 Apps Screenshots & Images

Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF iphone, ipad, apple watch and apple tv screenshot images, pictures.

Language English
Price Free
Adult Rating 4+ years and older
Current Version 14.7
Play Store com.gingerlabs.Notability
Compatibility iOS 15.0 or later

Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF (Versiyon 14.7) Install & Download

The application Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF was published in the category Productivity on 01 April 2010, Thursday and was developed by Ginger Labs [Developer ID: 318126112]. This program file size is 325.39 MB. This app has been rated by 283,591 users and has a rating of 4.7 out of 5. Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF - Productivity app posted on 23 January 2024, Tuesday current version is 14.7 and works well on iOS 15.0 and higher versions. Google Play ID: com.gingerlabs.Notability. Languages supported by the app:

DA NL EN FR DE ID IT JA KO MS NB PT RU ZH ES SV TH ZH TR UK VI Download & Install Now!
Other Apps from Ginger Labs Developer
App Name Score Comments Price
Notability Reviews 4.7 292,037 Free
Twobird Reviews 4.1 395 Free
Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF App Customer Service, Editor Notes:

Introducing Notability Widgets! Quickly create new notes, view a specific note, access your Recent Notes, or access notes in a specific subject with our 4 new Widgets. Thanks for using Notability!

Best Free Productivity Apps List

Find on this site the customer service details of Notability: Notes, Audio, PDF. Besides contact details, the page also offers a brief overview of the digital toy company.

Best Paid Productivity Apps List
App Name Released
Private LLM 05 June 2023
Scene Study 22 December 2010
Notes Writer Pro 2024 14 August 2018
Bean Choke Tool 2.0 23 August 2018
Scrivener 20 July 2016

Discover how specific cryptocurrencies work — and get a bit of each crypto to try out for yourself. Coinbase is the easiest place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Sign up and get started today.

Top Free App List
App Name Released
Microsoft Copilot 29 December 2023
PayPal - Send, Shop, Manage 03 February 2019
CapCut - Video Editor 14 April 2020
Google Chrome 28 June 2012
Duolingo - Language Lessons 13 November 2012

Looking for comprehensive training in Google Analytics 4? We've compiled the top paid and free GA4 courses available in 2024.

Top Paid App List
App Name Released
Pou 26 November 2012
Paprika Recipe Manager 3 15 November 2017
Poppy Playtime Chapter 2 15 August 2022
Minecraft 17 November 2011
HotSchedules 30 October 2008

Each capsule is packed with pure, high-potency nootropic nutrients. No pointless additives. Just 100% natural brainpower. Third-party tested and validated by the Clean Label Project.