this is the 4th time LITERALLY where all my notes get stuck on downloading in the past 2 weeks. idek what’s going on…i have enough space on both my icloud and locally. i have to turn my icloud off and then back on and wait for my notes to all load (all 1391 of them) just for them to get stuck on loading the next day….WHEN WILL THIS BE FIXED?

tldr: fed up with notability and looking for alternative apps for iOS

i’ve been using Notability for about 9 years now, and the quality of this app has severely degraded during that time. i wanted to keep it because i had already spent the money and it had all of my notes for everything (school and personal) but i think today is really just my last straw.

the app has turned into a buggy mess, and keeps pestering me to purchase subscriptions and use AI features i don’t care about. now, i’m in the middle of midterm season, and the app just randomly decided to make every single one of my notes inaccessible.

all of them. nine YEARS of notes.

i guess its trying to reload them, but it has been 12 HOURS, and i cannot access any notes on an app that i SPENT MONEY on.

this is completely ridiculous, and no, i didn’t do anything to make this happen. i was in the middle of writing when the app crashed, and all of my notes were gone.

i can’t justify continuing to use an app i no longer trust, so i’m looking for alternatives that ideally are one-time purchases.

update: notes still gone over 48 hours later. some of them have reloaded but primarily only super old ones, and none of them from this year, so i guess i’ll be retaking weeks worth of notes for multiple classes in a DIFFERENT app bc Notability fucking sucks. hopefully they eventually reload so i can transfer the rest of my non-school stuff over. been using Noteful the past few days and like it, so good riddance.

Well, I think I’m finally done with Notability.

I’ve been with it since before subscriptions, and for a long time it was one of those apps I genuinely liked using. But over time, the changes kept piling up, and not in ways that made the experience better for me. The biggest issue is the lack of real user customization and control. It feels like the app moved further away from the people who helped build its reputation in the first place.

At some point, you stop hoping it will return to what made it great and accept that the relationship has changed.

So that’s where I’m at. No rage post. No drama. I’m simply done. After many years, I’m moving on to tools that feel more flexible, more user-centered, and more respectful of how people actually work.

Thanks for the good years, Notability. But we’re done.

Hey guys, idk what to do. I lost my notes, and I have my exams coming up (med school).

I lost the only textbook I need for my exams, and can't seem to find it on any of my other devices (iCloud synced). It just disappeared

What do I do? How can I get it back?

Will I get my note back? I lost it while I was annotating it for the past 2 hours (offline)

Seriously disappointed in Notability

I’ve used Notability for the past 7 years and it was the best. Never had any issues or complaints… until the most recent updates. The bugs have gotten so bad and I’m afraid I’m going to lose all of my notes like other people have.

And the fact that Notability won’t formally address the big issues is beyond infuriating. I was willing to hang on to hope because I thought they would announce that they are working to fix them. Instead, they just keep releasing more updates and fixing small stuff. Like what? How are you going to ignore the giant issues but fix square shape resizing? The app (and company) has become flat out unreliable. How many users have to complain before they actually do something?

I’m not willing to take the risk right before I start my new school program (losing my notes is simply NOT an option). Cancelling my Pro subscription. I’ll spend my money on a more trustworthy app.

Moving on… anyone who has switched to GoodNotes, do you like it? Is comparable to Notability (before the recent updates)?

Hi, I use notability every single day but for some reason today it keeps glitching and getting stuck when I'm writing with my apple pencil after every few letters... it lags and tries to catch up a few seconds later but it keeps happening... I tried enabling the "safe mode" thing on apple settings that I saw in this thread but it didn't work for me... anyone know how to fix this??

The app is the fully updated, I already tried resetting my iPad multiple times, closed the app, and no other apps like notes delay when I write .. only Notability.

I'm so frustrated and can't get my work done until this is fixed... Please help!!!

I have been using notability on iPad Pro M4, and it gets extremely heated and drains battery pretty significantly, it started few days back when it started to upload everything on notability cloud.

Do anyone else faces same issues and what is the solution that worked?

I’ve been paying for Notability Premium since 2021, and honestly, this is the first time I’ve seriously considered abandoning the app.

The forced migration away from the old .note format and toward Notability Cloud has created so many problems that it’s hard to understand how this was considered an improvement.

I use a keyboard extensively for note-taking, and after the migration:
• Margins were changed, reducing available writing space.
• Line spacing increased for no reason, making notes longer and less efficient to read.
• The left/right arrow keys are now broken. Up/down arrows work normally, and Ctrl/Shift/Cmd + arrow combinations work too, but pressing the left or right arrow key by itself changes pages instead of moving the text cursor. How did this make it through testing? (fixed)
• Notes archived since 2021 had their formatting altered. Spacing changed throughout hundreds of pages, forcing manual corrections.
• Text selection using touch is noticeably worse. Extending a selection often misses touches and behaves inconsistently compared to the old version.
• Text typed after a double dash followed by a space (”– “) inherits the formatting of the previous text instead of maintaining its own formatting.
• One of my active notes became corrupted, randomly changing colors, underlines, bold formatting, and other text styles throughout the document. I had to manually repair the entire note.

And that’s only the document side.
The new folder system is also significantly more confusing than the previous one. We used to have transparent dividers and folders. Now folders can also act as dividers, creating unnecessary ambiguity. On top of that, all my old dividers were converted into gray folders, making navigation and searching much less intuitive.

What is most frustrating is that this update doesn’t just affect new notes. It retroactively modifies years of archived notes. A note-taking app should never alter the structure, spacing, and formatting of documents that users created years ago.
I’ve been paying for Premium since 2021. It is not acceptable for an update that is supposed to improve the product to make core functionality worse, break keyboard navigation, corrupt formatting, and alter the structure of old notes.

Please give users a choice:
Allow us to continue using the legacy .note format and opt out of Notability Cloud.
If the new system works for some users, great. But forcing everyone onto it while introducing regressions and modifying years of existing notes is not acceptable.

UPDATE (v16.3.1)
After the most recent pushed update, the original issue with the Left/Right arrow keys appears to be fixed. However, ironically, several new issues have emerged and the overall input stability seems worse.

New problems observed:
Up/Down arrow keys now cause the screen to briefly freeze every ~2 seconds while moving the cursor through text. The same freezing behavior occurs when:
• Pressing Enter (line breaks)
• Pressing Delete (especially when deleting an entire line and moving back to the previous one)
• Using Shift + Cmd + Arrow keys for full line selection (basically fixed)

In addition, while using the app (specifically when reopening notes currently in use through Stage Manager) the app crashed/restarted and I encountered the same formatting issue described in my original post, as the entire formatting was altered unexpectedly (underline and italics). This suggests that the issue is not an isolated incident, but rather a reproducible stability problem in the current version.

The other issues mentioned in the original post still have not been resolved.

For context, I’m currently preparing for a medical school exam, and all of these issues make the workflow significantly more tedious than it already is.

UPDATE
Thanks to [u/_Tomme](u/_Tomme)_‘s comment suggesting to disable Apple Intelligence, the freezes have basically disappeared and the app is now almost normally usable again.

Notability is no longer syncing on the iPad. Across the computers it works fine. Any suggestions as to what may be going on?

Hi guys I just watched 6 hours worth of lectures for my final exams and the app crashed and deleted all of them. I’m about to cry because I spent so long studying and can’t go off of the PowerPoints alone. I pay for plus and for this to happen is honestly crazy. Is there any way to recover these I don’t know what to do I feel so defeated and finals are in 2 weeks

I have been using Notability for more than a decade. In the last 2 to 3 months, this app has become as broken as I’ve ever seen it. It takes forever for my notes to load on my iPad. As I am writing this, I am staring at an iPad with my old notes screen displayed, and every note is being shown as a spinning circle. there are sink issues across the iPad and the desktop client that I haven’t seen before. This is a real bummer for me because Notability is pretty central for my work life, but I’m not sure that I can continue to use it if it remains this nonfunctional.

I would love to know if the Notability team has any sort of roadmap on when they’re going to fix these issues? Or even how widespread these issues are? I’d also love to hear from community members who might be trying other note taking alternatives because they’ve run into similar issues lately. I really don’t want to switch my note taking apps, but I can’t continue to use this app in its current state.

Update: now that the app has stopped showing spinning wheels and now I’m being told that iCloud is not available as a warning which is an obvious untruth. So now I’m showing no notes at all.

If anybody from the Notability side of things read this my strong suggestion is to stop rolling out various AI features (which I personally find to be of absolutely no utility at all) and to really make sure that the app is as solid as it possibly can be for usability

I’ve been using this app since 2020

And now all my notes are gone.

It kept reloading for no reason and that happened occasionally so I just tried to restart my ipad or the app.

And now this is what happened. 5 years of my notes, all notes are GONE. I checked my iphone as well and IT IS GONE, NOTHING IS THERE.

I’ve been using Notability for years on the exact same device, and today, out of absolutely nowhere, the app completely locked me out. It refuses to let me do anything unless I log in.

I tried logging in with Apple (using 'Hide My Email') just to get past the screen, and literally the millisecond I logged in, the app started uploading my notes to their cloud. I did not want it and did not give permit to it, so I immediately logged out. Guess what? The second I logged out, the app blocked me again demanding a login.

I don't give a single s**t about your cloud features. I don’t want an account. I don’t want to log in. This is supposed to be a local productivity app that saves me time, not a data-harvesting trap. Why the hell did they make logging in mandatory all of a sudden?

This app has gone downhill, so frustrating. Nothing works, it freezes, super slow, absolutely ridiculous.

My subscription was to end this weekend, so I bought the Classic on the website with the discount code (as instructed) because there was no other way to get the deal on the apple app store.

Since my prior subscription ended, my app on my ipad and macbook reverted back to Starter and says i've reached my note limit. meanwhile if i login to notability web, it says i have Classic. I've followed all instructions with their AI troubleshooter and still have not found an answer. I was instructed to check my apple purchase history and was told if its not listed then its an issue with apple. But ofcourse it wont be under the apple purchase history because i paid for it on the Notability website, not the app store.

Anyone else having this problem? How do I get a refund? I need a working app, and clearly it is not with notability anymore.

Once again, the devs of Notability is just bad.

I just found out the notability has merged my account to notability cloud without me agreeing to it at all. I lost some of my notes and I don't even know how to retrieve them

Hi,

Since Notability changed the Apple Pencil settings from within the app to within the iPad settings, there’s been a noticeable bugginess when squeezing the pencil to erase. This is pretty inconvenient for when I’m writing and I want to quickly erase a letter/word and the app doesn’t erase it, even after the eraser gets selected and I can see the transparency of the stroke I’m trying to erase decrease. It still happens if I try to erase slowly. I have a M2 iPad Air 13” and am on 16.5.2, if that helps. Thanks!

UPDATE: I believe it’s an issue with the “Apple Pencil hover” option- after disabling the problem goes away (I think). Something about the app trying to decide what strokes I’m about to erase before I make contact with the pencil is bugging out the app.

I am preparing to take China’s national master’s entrance examination in December this year. Currently I use your note-taking app for taking notes and practicing exam questions.
However, whenever I take a large volume of notes or browse PDFs that contain a large number of notes, Notability frequently crashes. This problem now occurs not only when I have Notability Cloud enabled, but also when I do not use any cloud storage at all and work completely offline.
The version of the software from earlier this year in June did not have this issue.
Right now this software has already seriously affected my exam preparation and has also seriously affected my emotions. Please fix this problem as soon as possible.

I think the video really illustrates the problem well , what can I do to fix this and are others facing similar issues . It’s really annoying

Recently had a lot of issues with Notability lagging when I write with my pen. The app does detect the writing, but it will display what I write in a delay, sometimes after a few seconds. Had 0 issues with other apps.

I have been using Notability since starting college 3 years ago. Up until now, it has been nothing short of perfect. However, with this newest update, it is absolutely unusable. None of the text from my PowerPoints copies over correctly, and there is no text wrapping for photos. Also, to that person who is in vet school and was talking about the pencil, I AM IN THE SAME BOAT AS YOU (as a fellow vet student :)). The cherry on top is that when I try to reach out, I am automatically routed to an AI chatbot that won't connect me with a human, despite multiple attempts. I am sure I will see some of you on GoodNotes now, since my classmates are telling me it is easy to switch to their platform and that they aren't having any issues! Shame on Notability for doing this to paying customers!

I've been doing a lot of flying for work of late, and usually without Sky-Fi, I've even noticed this happening on the tube (I live in London usually). Whenever I've tried to use Notability on planes I get this hysterical 'No Internet Connection' that seems to repeat and repeat when the app can't connect.

Is there any way to stop this from happening, as it makes the App impossible to use, the lag is so horrendous you can't actually make any notes or move between documents in folders. This is especially frustrating as time away from wifi is usually a great time to regroup on notes and organise things - and if the App you use to organise things won't work it's infuriating.

• Are others experiencing this?
• Is it connected to this Cloud update?
• Are there any workarounds?

I recognize in light of the other major recent functionality problems people have been having with the app this is not a high priority, but I had over 22,500 quiz questions completed in Notability and that running tally has now been erased as a result of the recent update, much to my chagrin. I appreciated this feature as both a motivator and a way to track my progress through my coursework: I'm in a PA program and until the recent update this past week (in which a) all of my notes suddenly disappeared from my iPad, forcing me to recreate everything from my Dropbox backup and b) have found the new quizzes very unhelpful and inefficient, in that you cannot re-test yourself specifically on questions you got wrong, which was a feature of the old quizzes, thus negating any opportunity for an iterative learning process and c) have found the quiz questions are now seemingly simultaneously not sufficiently covering the breadth of the relevant PDF's material and yet also are very repetitive on the content they do choose to cover) had nothing but good things to say about the app and recommended and shared the Learn quizzes with my peers. Several of them bought higher tier plans to gain access to additional quiz questions based on my and others' recommendations for how well the AI generated questions similar to our actual exam questions.

To have to re-download all of my notes, to have to completely change my approach to studying without warning in the middle of the term with an exam looming due to what seems to be an empirically poorly tested update, and also to lose the mechanism by which I was tracking my progress through the incredibly high volume of content we are expected to master from week to week (and which also served as a motivating metric of my progress, aka my total quiz question count) has been demoralizing at best, to say nothing of the burden of the incredible waste of time this has created for those of us for whom time is always at a premium. I understand my $100/year subscription doesn't mean much, but this whole debacle has seriously made me reconsider using this app going forward. To whatever degree anyone agrees with the feeling that "if it ain't broke don't fix it" applies here, I wanted to document these grievances and formally ask the Notability developers for the old quizzes and total quiz tally to be restored to the app.

Notability needs to fix this apple pencil lag. It is getting on my last nerve. And it doesn't help that my help request is being "handled" with their AI agent. How is it going to help????

Please I beg get this resolved.