---
title: 'My Notes: A Markdown App for Android'
description: A small Android note app built on Markwon. The idea wasn't new; the point was learning a platform that wasn't the web.
date: 2026-05-02
period: 'November 2019'
thumbnail:
  src: ./_assets/my-notes.png
  alt: Screenshots of the My Notes Android app.
links:
  - label: Source
    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/my-notes
article:
  tags: ['tools']
  role: Android app author
  stack: ['Android', 'Markdown', 'Markwon']
  outcome: A working notes app and my first time outside the web stack
  audience: technical
project:
  title: My Notes
  description: A small Android Markdown note app. The point was a few weeks outside the web stack.
  thumbnail:
    alt: Screenshot of the My Notes Android markdown app.
---

In November 2019 I wrote my own notes app for Android, used it daily for a while, and then watched it lose a long, fair fight with Obsidian. The losing was the useful part: I learned what I actually wanted from a notes app by watching mine fail to be it, one small daily annoyance at a time. Years later the same itch resurfaced as [reconcile-text](/articles/reconcile-text-3-way-merge/); by then I was editing the same notes in Vim, VS Code, and Obsidian, and nothing existed to merge three independently edited copies back into one.

The app itself was modest: Markdown notes, hashtag filtering, Markwon doing the rendering. Every developer writes a notes app eventually, and the bar for shipping one isn't high. What I was really buying was a few weeks somewhere that wasn't the web: a platform with different opinions about lifecycle, storage, and what happens to your process when the user looks away. Android delivered exactly that, and I'd still recommend "build a small thing on an unfamiliar platform" as the cheapest way to find out which of your habits are skills and which are just local customs.
