Robby Burns writing on his website about Evernote’s recent announcement:

So I think this is the final straw. I am going to let my Evernote subscription lapse this fall when it comes to a close. The real challenge about this situation for me, and other Evernote users, is that it is the most fully featured note app on the market. Of all the things one might want from a note app, Evernote covers more of them than any of the competition. But unfortunately for Evernote, stock software like Apple Notes is good enough to do most of the things people need. And for those who want more, there is an emerging bunch of independent developers making note apps who show way more hustle, adding major features to their apps, annually (Bear, for example).

I have been thinking a lot about this lately as well. I’ve been very frustrated about Evernote’s direction. It seems like they are too focused on only providing business features. I don’t know about their business, but I do know that Microsoft has a pretty big strong hold on the business world. Time will tell I guess.

Robby goes on to talk a little about Devonthink:

This summer I have been giving DEVONthink a try. It is a Mac and iOS app that is a one time paid purchase on each device. It is a document management app that has all of the “everything bucket” features of Evernote and more. I hope to write more on it soon. For now, I am pretty happy that I have an easy way to clip receipts, websites for later review, and emails, and have them made automatically text searchable. The DEVONthink app on Mac is hideous, and setting up iCloud sync took me a minute, but the utility of the app is worth it so far. I prefer something like this rather than to continue to support companies who string their customers along while they spend time and money on making their elephant mascot look more 2018. 

I have tried Devonthink and I have very mixed feelings. As Robby talks about, the Mac app is just gross looking. Functionally it’s amazing, but it’s hard to look at. The iOS app is better, but it’s still not the best looking iOS app in my opinion. I really like that Evernote is a web app. I love that I can forward an email into Evernote. Getting email into Devonthink, without using my mac, is probably my biggest annoyance. The other big problem with Devonthink is that as a note taker it’s not very good, in fact I find it confusing actually. The fact is, as far as text notes go, there are at least a dozen good apps on iOS to use, so if I decide to finally leave Evernote, I may break up my everything bucket between text notes in something like Bear, and documents in DEVONthink. But what I really want is for Evernote to talk about what they are really doing and not give vague nothing answers and spend a lot of time redesigning their logo..