27 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
27 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'My Notes: A Markdown App for Android'
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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.
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date: 2026-05-02
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period: 'November 2019'
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thumbnail:
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src: ./_assets/my-notes.png
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alt: Screenshots of the My Notes Android app.
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links:
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- label: Source
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url: https://github.com/schmelczer/my-notes
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article:
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tags: ['tools']
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role: Android app author
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stack: ['Android', 'Markdown', 'Markwon']
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outcome: A working notes app and my first time outside the web stack
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audience: technical
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project:
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title: My Notes
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description: A small Android Markdown note app. The point was a few weeks outside the web stack.
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thumbnail:
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alt: Screenshot of the My Notes Android markdown app.
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---
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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.
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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.
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