David Holman

@DTLow The legacy app was well done for it's time, as the performance demonstrates. But it was platform-specific, hence Evernote's [perfectly reasonable] desire to kill it off. @TechPerplexed Any good product person saw what Electron meant for the market -- it was a fundamental shift to the platform-agnostic future. It's a beautiful thing, but not for the faint of heart once you get into complex applications. You need a really good software architect to keep it from crumbling under its own weight. EN screwed this one up. I took it as a good time to get out of cloud dependence and move to a local-first solution (eg Joplin or Obsidian). I cancelled my paid subscription to EN as soon as I could after v10 came out. I just haven't found a good camera scanner yet. And I do miss the excellent OCR search of my whiteboards. But honestly I don't need it with my extensive tagging system.

Based on my experience building software products, the new app is a dead end. It will eventually lead to a painful rewrite and probably user suffering. Despite over a decade of EN use, I'd rather not sign up for that. It's worth noting here for those who haven't dug into it … Joplin is open source and supports user generated plug ins. Some of those are really quite fantastic productivity wins. Between the plug-ins and the customizability, it's a treat to use and gets better with time.

If I had any expectation that the Legacy app would be supported a year from now, I would be completely happy with no further updates.

Joplin has a normal WYSIWYG mode too. I just like the option to work in the stripped down markdown editor as I've always done in nvAlt and GitHub.

If you're comfortable with Markdown, Joplin is a solid solution. I run the legacy Evernote on Android and Mac and honestly nothing beats those two apps. But, looking to the future direction of En, v10 has been out long enough now that's there's no reason for it to suck so bad still. If that's how En is going to build software, then it just isn't going to work for me. I've been running En (the legacy version) in combination with nvAlt for lightweight markdown-based note taking for several years now. I don't love having two systems, but I do love the flexibility. Jumping to Joplin basically allows me to do both in one place. The experience isn't as smooth as legacy En, but it's a whole lot better than v10. The one thing that still keeps me around En is the doc scanner mode on mobile. I use it all the time to capture my notes and whiteboards in a clean format. I hate straight photo captures of stuff like that. I'll have to get over it eventually -- you can't have it all.

Guess it's worth noting that I let my subscription lapse because of EN's recent updates too. I'm happy to pay if I see a path forward with a product. Currently, I'm looking at a dead end with EN, so I'm getting ready to subscribe to other systems for a while as I eval their features.

After a couple of months trying to convince myself things would get better with v10 and my trusty friends at Evernote hadn't abandoned me, I finally had to accept that it was really just a big failure and EN doesn't seem to care. Thanks to the assistance here, I've installed Evernote Legacy on my Mac and v8 on my Android. I notice it less on my Mac, but I'd forgotten how far superior the Android experience is in the old version. Everything is faster and more reliable. It's also generally easier to use, even if it doesn't look quite as "modern". While I'm enjoying my old apps, I'm assuming EN won't give up on their investment in the new code base and I'll be forced over at some point. I don't think I can live with that. I'm moving forward with testing new platforms like Notion.

Thanks for the Android links @gazumped! I'm back in my functional Evernote now.

I held off on the update for a few months (not something I usually worry about with EN) and finally went for it on Android and Mac. Other than a slightly more "modern" UI, everything is worse. And this Home thing they keep touting in email marketing is a meager enhancement at best. I've been a daily user for over a decade and this is the first time I've been truly disappointed. I'm a software product manager -- I know how hard big roll outs can be. I feel their pain. But, months in, they need to publicly admit that v10 is a train wreck and figure out a path forward. I'll definitely be experimenting with other options. For now, I need to go figure out how to roll back my Mac and Android updates 🤞

Thanks for the tip about keeping the main app open. I might live with it to contain my note sprawl. Right now I have about a 50/50 content split between new notes in Evernote and nvAlt just because of this Helper issue and it's making my brain hurt.

I've started moving to nvAlt. It never fails, syncs to Simplenote, and at least supports markdown formatting. Helper has so little functionality that I'm not missing it.

I've had the exact same problem hit me intermittently. Helper had been functioning fine for several months, then out of nowhere it lost a note from a critical client call. If past experience holds true, your missing notes will mysteriously show up one day within the next week. Seems to be a problem with the local database. Bottom line, Helper can't be trusted.