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Comment by janxgeist | Hacker News Reader

For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side.

I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app.

Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work.

For some reason, Evernote (both android app and windows client) just seemed to get worse every year.

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Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable.

I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.

Same here. I'm still using version 7 of their desktop software on OS X, now badged Legacy. It's fantastic, fast, multiple tabs (unlike the new Evernote app!!!), OCR, works well with images/PDF/Office Docs, I've never had a problem with syncing, I can format notes as I wish etc, etc.

Over the past 10 days it has started displaying a daily upgrade message forcing me to the new tab-less Electron app. I'm resisting but I've no doubt it will stop syncing any day.

Much of my daily workflow is focused around Evernote. It's going to a pain to move but I am going to. If they'd have just left things alone I would have been a paying customer probably until my dying day.

The legacy app is absolutely NOT fast if you have a significant amount of notes. Still worth using because the current app simply lacks the functionality (they "solved" the costantly freezing problem by preventing people from selecting more than 50 notes at once, for example). But certainly not fast

Electron is the single biggest scourge to end users since Windows ME.

That was what killed it for me. After they rewrote in Electron, using the app always felt sluggish, and despite the fact that it didn't actually interfere with any of my uses of it, I went from really liking their service to tolerating it as the lesser of several evils.

I'm not sure whether electron itself is bad, or if it's the fact that any company who would use it has made an executive decision to cut corners and sacrifice user happiness for development velocity (Microsoft/VS Code excepted, mostly). Any such company would put out a bad product no matter what. Electron might just be the common subpar solution that these types of companies all gravitate towards; without it, they'd probably still build bad apps, but in a million different frameworks instead of just one.

Is it really though? I feel like it’s allowing many clients to exist that otherwise wouldn’t ever get written.

I see your a quantity over quality type.

Electron is a great tool tbh, I'm not on the hate train, but let's not pretend like electron is some bastion of quality or performance. People's grievances are legitimate, and part of that reason is just how low the bar is to ship something with it. Great for tinkerers, but sours normal users.

I can remember a lot of applications just not being available on Linux or Mac and you just had to suck it up. An Electron app beats that. And it’s not like Java UI apps were so much sleeker.

Don't know about ME, but I have many native apps on my Mac, and it's jarring when switching to any electron app. It's always janky.

Isn't Notion an Electron app or just a webapp?

Fastmail is an excellent example of a very reliable, slow changing product with a consistent price. I’ve been a subscriber for over 20 years, and I’m thrilled that it hardly ever changes in perceptible ways and just does it’s job. In more recent years, they have started to introduce some changes but seem very careful about it.

I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the treacly app.

It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.

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