Notebooks is a writing app, text and markdown editor, your personal Wiki and Zettelkasten, a file organizer, task manager, PDF and eBook creator and more.
Notebooks on iPhone and iPad is designed for moments when ideas happen. Whether you’re writing on the go, sketching with Apple Pencil, or planning in a quiet corner, it helps you capture thoughts quickly and return to them later — without friction.
On iPad, writing feels spacious and distraction-free. Use the keyboard, Apple Pencil, or dictation — whatever fits the moment. Typewriter mode, flexible formatting, and clean typography keep the focus on your words, not the interface.
Notebooks supports multi-window and Split View, letting you research, plan, and write at the same time. Drag text, links, or images between apps, or between notebooks, just as naturally as you’d expect on iPadOS.
Smart Books, tags, and contexts help structure your notes without forcing a rigid system. You can keep things simple — or build a powerful personal knowledge base over time.
Your documents live in regular folders and can sync via iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or WebDAV. Everything stays accessible across devices, so you can move seamlessly between iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Custom Storage Locations: When Options are Grayed Out
The file and folder selection dialog may also show a list of applications like Dropbox, Boxcryptor, OneDrive, and others. These are cloud storage providers, acting as interfaces to data stored on a cloud service. In the dialog, they appear as folders, but they are actually applications controlling access to documents stored elsewhere. While these providers grant access to single, selected files, they do not allow Notebooks to access the contents of their folders. This, however, is necessary to support search, tasks management, contexts, link management and much more in Notebooks. So, while selecting a specific Boxcryptor or OneDrive folder is tempting, these storage providers currently do not supported that.
When iCloud Sync Seems Stuck and Notebooks Fails to Launch
When you have configured Notebooks to store its documents on iCloud Drive, you may encounter situations where Notebooks indicates the need to synchronize a substantial number of documents repeatedly. During the synchronization process, Notebooks may experience sluggishness or even fail to launch. In either case, it is advisable to thoroughly examine iCloud Drive, optimize the synchronization speed, and ensure that all of Notebooks' documents are consistently accessible locally (without the need for on-demand downloads from iCloud). Here are a few straightforward steps to achieve this:
Open the Files app on your iPhone or iPad, or open a new Finder window on your Mac.
Navigate to iCloud Drive, look for the Notebooks folder and tap & hold or right-click its title
From the popup menu that appears, select "Download Now".
Now iCloud Drive starts downloading all of Notebooks' documents, which may take a some time. When the download is completed, Notebooks should open without delay, and its responsiveness should be back to normal.
To prevent these hangs from happening again, reopen the mentioned popup menu, and select "Keep downloaded". This keeps iOS/macOS from removing local copies of documents you don't use regularly.
Notebooks and Apple Advanced Data Protection (End-to-End Encryption)
Starting with iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1, Apple allows users to enable Advanced Data Protection. This end-to-end encryption protects the majority of iCloud data, even in the case of a data breach in the cloud. The term vast majority is not very specific, so you may ask yourself whether this includes Notebooks' documents.
According to Apple's specifications, data stored on iCloud Drive are end-to-end encrypted when transferred across trusted devices. More specifically, any files manually or automatically saved to iCloud Drive are encrypted, which clearly includes Notebooks' documents as well.
So when you use Notebooks with iCloud Drive as storage location, your documents are end-to-end encrypted when transferred across your devices.
If you are still using Notebooks 8 on a device running iOS 14 you probably notice that opening formatted documents or Markdown documents causes Notebooks to close. This is a known issue with Notebooks 8 which we are unable to fix, because Notebooks 8 has been discontinued in early 2020. You find a guide how to work around that on a dedicated blog entry.
Migrate Documents from Notebooks 8 to Notebooks 11
Notebooks 8 and Notebooks 10 provide a convenient method for migrating your documents directly on the device, without duplicating it. A detailed guide is available on this site.
However, you can also set up Notebooks 10 without migrating documents from Notebooks 8, and instead import the documents from your Dropbox or a WebDAV server by setting up the same sync method that you have been using in Notebooks 8.
Notebooks 10 does not support the optional PDF Reader any more (it was available in Notebooks 8). The main reason for this move is that you can now have free PDF editing apps which are much more capable than our PDF Reader ever was. Still, we want to provide our users with the same functionality we had and offer equivalent alternatives:
Notebooks 10 supports the PDF annotation tools that are part of iOS 13. So you have basic PDF editing tools available simply by tapping a PDF document once. (Notebooks' PDF handling capabilities will grow with the next releases).
In Notebooks 10 you can use the "Open in…" menu to open PDF (and other) documents in external apps without duplicating them. So you store and manage your PDFs in Notebooks, but use external apps to open, view and edit them. All changes you make are stored in Notebooks. If you need a recommendation for a PDF editing app - and if Apple Books is not capable enough - you could look at the free app PDF Viewer, which is the more grown up version of Notebooks’ former PDF Reader.
