Among the note apps almost everyone carries in their pocket, Apple Notes is the best equipped for keeping things in order. There are folders. There are subfolders inside folders. There are smart folders, which gather notes on their own according to criteria you set. And there are tags, which cut across everything else.
It's free, you already have it, and it works. This article doesn't try to tell you it's badly made: it tries to ask you a different, more uncomfortable question — whether order is worth it.
What it does really well
It opens in half a second, syncs between iPhone, iPad and Mac without you doing anything, and costs nothing. It scans documents with the camera, protects notes with a password, lets you write by hand with the pencil, and can be shared with the people you work with.
And it needs saying loud and clear, because it changes the comparison compared with a few years ago: it records audio inside the note and generates a transcription. If your problem was "dictating instead of typing", Notes already solves it, for free. Pretending that your phone's free app is primitive is the fastest way to make you close this page.
The problem isn't order. It's keeping it
Three organization systems living side by side — folders, smart folders, tags — are three systems that you have to choose and keep alive. And maintenance isn't something you do once: it repeats with every new note, forever.
The bill comes due at three moments, and none of them is when you build the system.
When you save. Before you can put a thought away you have to answer a question: where do I put it? It arrives when the idea has just been born and lasts only a few seconds, and it moves you from having it to cataloguing it. In the car, walking, standing in line at the post office, that question is enough to make you say "I'll write it down later". Then you don't.
When the system gets old. The folders you drew up in January describe January's work. By June you have new clients, a closed project, a topic that has grown enough to deserve a folder of its own. Reorganizing takes an afternoon, and you never find that afternoon — so your recent notes all end up in "Misc".
When you search. And this is where the real flaw shows: to find something you have to remember what you called it and where you put it. But if you already remembered both, you wouldn't need to search for it.
And there is no right answer
There's also a more mundane reason why perfect order never arrives: does a note about a project with a client in the wine business go in "Projects", "Clients" or "Wine"?
Tags look like the solution — a note can have many — but they move the problem one step further: they have to be remembered and written the same way every time, and a single "clients" where you'd previously written "client" is enough for that note to silently drop out of the group. Why Itomori has no folders and never will comes precisely from here.
The third way: organize nothing
Itomori starts from the other end. Open, press, speak for thirty seconds, close. No folder to choose, no tag to remember, no title to invent — it writes the title itself afterwards, by reading what you said.
Order doesn't disappear: it changes hands. Every note is linked to the others by meaning, and search works by concept rather than by exact words: ask "what did I say about the price" and it finds the note where you talked about "how much to charge for it", which doesn't contain the word "price" at all. I explained how it works here.
It's not that Itomori sorts better. It's that it removes the work of sorting altogether, along with the question that work imposes at the worst possible moment.
Transcribing isn't understanding
A transcription is a block of text: faithful, useful, and inert. It stays as it is, and everything that comes after is up to you.
From a recording, Itomori draws a title, a summary, the key points and the to-dos; it links it to the notes that talk about the same thing; and if you need it, it gives it back to you as a post, an email, a draft article or an outline for a talk — in your own words, because it starts from yours. There's also a clean transcript, without the "um"s and false starts, downloadable as Word or PDF: the difference between having the text of a meeting and having something to send to the people who weren't there.
What "free" really costs
Apple Notes is free, and it's the yardstick for measuring any alternative. With one caveat almost nobody considers: the storage is iCloud's, five gigabytes shared with your photos, videos and phone backups. They're the first to run out, and when that happens you pay for the space, not for the notes.
| Apple Notes | Itomori | |
|---|---|---|
| Price of the app | free | free forever |
| How it's organized | folders, smart folders, tags — you maintain them | nothing to organize |
| Storage included | 5 GB of iCloud, shared with photos and backups | unlimited notes |
| If storage runs out | from €0.99/month (50 GB) to €9.99 (2 TB) | — |
| On Android | no app, browser only | yes, installable |
Prices and limits are as of the date this article was published: they change, and it's always worth checking the official websites.
Outside the ecosystem
One condition settles it on its own: if you have an iPhone and a Windows computer, or if someone around you uses Android, Notes stops being convenient. There's no Android app, and from Windows you go through the browser on iCloud.com, with less than what you have on the iPhone.
What Itomori doesn't do, and what's coming
It doesn't scan documents and doesn't hold attachments: no photographed receipts, no annotated PDFs.
You can't write by hand. If you take notes with a pencil on your iPad, that's a different category of tools.
It isn't built into the system. Notes lives inside your phone: Control Center, the share sheet, Siri. That convenience can't be replicated from the outside.
Shared notes aren't there yet, but they will come.
How to bring your notes over
There's no direct import from Notes: Itomori accepts .md, .txt and .docx. But my advice is to not move anything: leave your archive where it is and try Itomori for two weeks only on new ideas, the ones you don't save anywhere today because capturing them costs too much. If after two weeks that's where the thoughts that matter end up, decide then — with real data, not with a promise.
When Notes is enough, and when it isn't
Notes is enough if you jot things down, keep lists, scan documents, share the shopping list with the people you live with, and live inside the Apple ecosystem. It's free, it works, and keeping two or three folders tidy isn't a burden.
Try Itomori if you recognize yourself in any of these: you've stopped keeping things in order and now everything is in "Misc"; you have ideas while driving and lose them; you record meetings you never listen to again; you have the feeling you've already thought something without being able to find it; or you need to turn those notes into something written.
They're two different jobs and they coexist perfectly well: the everyday notebook on one side, the place where thoughts weave together on the other.