schmelczer-dev/src/content/work/my-notes-android-markdown-app.md

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