What happens to your notes when a notes app shuts down
What users of Pocket, Omnivore, Skiff and five other dead apps got to keep, and a ten-minute exit drill for Apple Notes, Google Keep, Notion and Evernote.
PS
Prashant Shaw
Founder, Sumibako
7 min read
Every notes app tells you it is the last notes app you will ever need. A surprising number of them turn out to be right, in the sense that it was the last one they ever made.
This post is a short walk through the graveyard: what each app's users got to keep, how much warning they had, and what the deaths have in common. Then a ten-minute exit drill for the apps most people actually use, so the next farewell email finds you calm and already packed. Every fact is linked to where it came from, checked on 3 October 2026. The last section is about the app I build, which is small and new and therefore precisely the kind of app this post is about. I will be honest about it.
⚰️ A short walk through the graveyard
Two of these were read-later apps rather than notes apps. They held years of people's highlights and notes, so they count, and their funerals were the best attended.
App
Notice given
What users could take
Google Notebook, 2011 to 2012
About ten months
Google copied every notebook into Google Docs for you
Springpad, 2014
About a month
JSON, read-only HTML, or a move into Evernote
Wunderlist, 2020
Three years, give or take
Its replacement, Microsoft To Do, came from the same team
Drafts, snippets and settings. The mail itself stayed in Gmail
A few of these deserve a eulogy.
Google Notebook is the gold standard, which is not a sentence about Google that gets written often. Google announced it in September 2011, made notebooks read-only in November, copied their contents into Google Docs itself, and switched the lights off in July 2012. Nobody had to do anything. Nobody has been that polite since.
Wunderlist had the longest goodbye in software. Microsoft said in April 2017 that it would eventually go, then announced the actual date in December 2019, and the app left on 6 May 2020. Three years with its coat on, standing by the door, saying it really must be going.
Omnivore was open source, privacy-minded and much loved, and none of that helped. Its team joined ElevenLabs at the end of October 2024, and users were first given two weeks to export before deletion on 15 November. After the criticism you would expect, that became 30 November. Two weeks is less notice than most gyms want before you cancel.
Pocket lived for eighteen years. It started in 2007 as a Firefox extension called Read It Later, joined Mozilla in 2017, and on 22 May 2025 Mozilla announced it would shut down on 8 July. Exports were open until 8 October, and then Mozilla gave procrastinators an extra month, to 6 November. I like to think that extension was for one specific person, and that they still missed it.
Skiff is the one with a sequel. Notion bought it in February 2024 and the service mostly shut down on 9 August 2024. Its infrastructure went on to become Notion Mail. In June 2026 Notion announced that Notion Mail would shut down too, on 22 September 2026, with exports due the day before. That was less than two weeks before I wrote this. The sequel got cancelled as well.
And Boost Note, which told its users plainly that after 30 September 2025 all of their data would be permanently deleted and could not be recovered. No new chapter, no exciting journey. Credit where it is due: nobody could say they were not warned.
📝NOTE
Evernote is not in the graveyard. It is alive, with a free plan that, as of February 2025, holds 50 notes and one notebook on one device. Not a funeral. More of a move into a smaller flat.
🔍 What the deaths have in common
1️⃣ The notice is not yours to choose. It ranged from two weeks to three years, and the generous end of that range was a company the size of Microsoft. You cannot plan on getting the long one, so plan on the short one.
2️⃣ There was almost always an export. In every case above, something could be taken away before the date. What varied was the format: JSON, ENEX, HTML, a CSV, a move into one named competitor. An export in a format nothing else reads is a souvenir, not a backup.
3️⃣ The text survives and the shape does not. Words come out well. What tends to stay behind is everything around them: links between notes, the nesting, highlights tied to a page that no longer exists, a database's views, comments. I went through exactly what a Notion export keeps and drops in another post, and the pattern holds well beyond Notion.
4️⃣ Nobody lost their notes to the shutdown. They lost them to the deadline. Every one of these dates was announced. The notes that vanished belonged to people who did not read the email, or read it and thought "next weekend", which is the most dangerous phrase in personal computing.
🚪 The ten-minute exit drill
Do this once a quarter, or immediately on hearing that your notes app is "excited to begin a new chapter". Pick your app.
Apple Notes. On a Mac with macOS Tahoe 26 or later, select a note and choose File, then Export To, then Markdown or PDF. Apple's guide for this describes it a note at a time. On iOS 26 the same thing lives in the Share menu as Export as Markdown. Before version 26 there was no Markdown export at all, so if you have hundreds of notes and an older Mac, now is a good afternoon to find that out.
Google Keep. Go to Google Takeout, untick everything, tick Keep, and export. Google's Keep help lists what comes with it: note content, attachments, colours, pinned and archived state, collaborators and labels.
Notion. Settings, Export all workspace content, Markdown & CSV, with subpages included. Notion emails you a link, and that link expires after seven days, which is a deadline inside your deadline. Our Notion import page walks through the clicks.
Evernote. The desktop app exports notes and whole notebooks as ENEX or HTML. ENEX is Evernote's own format, and a fair number of other apps can import it, Apple Notes among them.
Obsidian. Your notes are already Markdown files in a folder on your disk. Copy the folder. That is the whole drill. It takes Obsidian users about eleven seconds, and they will tell you about it for considerably longer.
Then do the step everyone skips: open the export somewhere else. Unzip it, open a few files, check that a long note is all there and an image still shows. An export you have never opened is not a backup. It is a rumour.
💡TIP
Put the zip in a second place you already pay for, like another cloud drive or an external disk, and give it a name with the date in it. "notes-export-final-FINAL.zip" will not be helpful to you in 2029.
🗞️ Reading the farewell email
Shutdown announcements are written in a dialect. A small phrasebook, for the next time one lands:
The email says
It means
"We're joining a company whose mission we share"
Export this week
"We're focusing on our core product"
You were not the core product
"This is not goodbye"
It is
"Your data will remain accessible until"
That date is real. Write it down
"An exciting new chapter"
For the founders. Your chapter is the export
The quieter signs come earlier: a changelog that stops, a mobile app that has not been updated in a year, a free plan that suddenly shrinks, support replies that take a week. None of them means the end is coming. All of them mean the drill is worth ten minutes.
🫣 Yes, this applies to me too
This is the part I build, so adjust your trust accordingly. Sumibako is a small, new notes app, which is the exact demographic of the table at the top of this post. So here is what leaving it looks like, before you ever need to know.
Every page exports from its own menu as a Markdown file or a PDF, or copies to the clipboard as Markdown. A page and everything filed under it exports as one zip of Markdown files, nested in folders the way Notion's export is, so the structure you built comes out as folders rather than one long file. That is on every plan, the free one included, because an app you cannot leave is not an app you should trust with anything real. If you use a coding agent, it can read any page back as Markdown through the command line or the MCP connector, which makes "copy everything out" a sentence you can say to it.
Two gaps, told here rather than in a farewell email. There is no single button yet that exports the whole vault in one go: it is one zip per top-level page. And images come out as links to their files rather than as the files themselves, so for a real backup, keep the originals of any pictures that matter.
🪦 The moral
The best time to export your notes was before the email. The second best time is today, and it takes ten minutes. Keep your notes somewhere whose exit is a door rather than a window, check that the door opens now and then, and the next obituary in your inbox will be something you read with mild interest over coffee instead of something you read twice, slowly, at 1am.
🦄
Is there a web version of Obsidian? No, and five ways around it
Obsidian has no web version. Five ways to reach a vault from a browser anyway, from GitHub's free editor to the real app on a server, and what each costs.
