---
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
projectPeriod: 'November 2019'
thumbnail:
  src: ./_assets/my-notes.png
  alt: Screenshots of the My Notes Android app.
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
links:
  - label: Source
    url: https://github.com/schmelczer/my-notes
---

In November 2019 I wrote my own notes app for Android, used it daily for a while, and then it lost a long battle with Obsidian. The loss was the lesson: I learned what I actually wanted from a notes app by watching mine fail to be it. Years later that same itch is why I wrote [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 small: Markdown notes, hashtag filtering, Markwon for rendering. Every developer writes their own notes app eventually and the bar for shipping one isn't high. What I actually wanted was a few weeks outside the web stack, somewhere with different conventions about lifecycle, storage, and resource constraints. Android delivered that. I'd still recommend "write a small thing on a new platform" as a way to recalibrate what you take for granted.
