When a beloved note-taking app tries to do everything, it risks doing nothing well.
There was a time when opening GoodNotes felt like cracking open a fresh notebook. You’d pick up your Apple Pencil, and you’d write. No wizards, no AI prompts hovering at the edge of your vision, no subscription tiers to worry about. Just digital ink on digital paper. That version of GoodNotes — clean, focused, and quietly brilliant — is getting harder to find beneath the growing pile of features.
The Quiet App That Won Our Hearts
GoodNotes earned its reputation not by being the flashiest app on the iPad, but by being the most trustworthy. Students relied on it for lecture notes. Professionals marked up contracts and research papers. Bullet journal enthusiasts designed their entire lives inside its pages. The magic was in the constraint: GoodNotes did one thing — handwritten digital note-taking — and it did that one thing extraordinarily well.
The ink engine felt natural. The PDF annotation was rock-solid. The folder system was intuitive enough that you didn’t need a tutorial. For years, GoodNotes was the app people pointed to when someone asked, “What should I use my Apple Pencil for?”
Then Came the Feature Avalanche
GoodNotes 6 arrived with a new pricing model and an ambitious vision. AI-powered handwriting correction. Spellcheck that rewrites your words in your own handwriting style. Math assistance. Exam prep materials. Then came the September 2025 overhaul: Whiteboards with infinite canvas, Text Documents with a block-based editor, automated note-taking, “Goodnotes AI,” rebuilt shape and diagram tools with connectors and labels, and real-time collaboration features.
The pace hasn’t slowed. Recent quarters have added editable AI-generated diagrams, collapsible multi-level outlines, pinned text tools, new gesture systems, audio transcription, and toolbar after toolbar of options.
On paper, each of these features sounds reasonable. Useful, even. But zoom out and a different picture emerges: GoodNotes is no longer a note-taking app. It’s trying to be a whiteboard app, a word processor, an AI tutor, a collaboration platform, and a study tool — all at once.
The User Experience Tax
Every new feature comes with a hidden cost that doesn’t show up on any changelog: cognitive overhead.
The toolbar has become a negotiation. Users on GoodNotes’ own feedback forums describe accidentally closing notebooks when reaching for the undo button, because the UI has been reorganized so many times. The floating toolbar blocks content. The lasso tool now spawns a pop-up menu automatically, interrupting workflows that users spent years building. Double-tap behavior on the Apple Pencil — something that should be muscle memory — has been changed to cycle through tools instead of the simple toggle between pen and eraser.
One long-time user on the GoodNotes feedback forum put it bluntly: the app “forgot the simplicity of prior versions which made it the best handwritten note-taking tool.” Another described how the latest update made “even simple note-taking tasks unnecessarily complicated and frustrating.”
This isn’t a minority opinion. Review after review mentions a growing learning curve. A “complicated interface.” The sense that an app once known for getting out of your way now demands your constant attention.
The AI Question Nobody Asked
GoodNotes has poured significant resources into AI features: handwriting spellcheck, word completion, AI-generated diagrams, and AI-powered summaries. The company itself acknowledged the cost, noting that “these technologies do cost money” — a justification for the shift from a one-time purchase to a subscription model.
But here’s the uncomfortable question: did users actually want their note-taking app to have AI? The word completion feature was quietly discontinued in March 2025 after a year of testing, with GoodNotes admitting that other features proved “more impactful.” The AI autocorrect, by many accounts, still overlaps corrected words with existing text and misses obvious mistakes. As one reviewer noted, the AI-driven suggestions are “always wrong, even the most obvious ones.”
There’s a pattern in the productivity app world where companies, under pressure to justify recurring revenue, bolt on AI features that serve the business model more than the user. GoodNotes appears to be following this playbook — adding intelligence to an app whose greatest intelligence was knowing when to stay silent.
What Gets Lost in the Bloat
When an app expands in every direction, something subtle but critical erodes: trust in the core experience.
GoodNotes users now report performance issues — lag between writing and ink appearing on screen, crashes when handling large notebooks, high battery drain from the combination of Apple Pencil input, real-time handwriting recognition, and constant sync. These aren’t edge cases. They’re the predictable consequences of an app trying to run an AI engine, a collaboration layer, a whiteboard renderer, and a text editor all within the same process.
The irony is painful. GoodNotes originally won because the writing experience felt immediate and natural — like pen on paper. Every millisecond of lag, every unexpected toolbar animation, every AI suggestion that pops up uninvited, chips away at that fundamental promise.
The Simplicity Gap in the Market
Here’s what makes this story especially relevant: GoodNotes’ drift toward complexity has created an opening. Notability continues to attract users who, as one comparison noted, just want to “open the app and start writing — no setup required.” Simpler, more focused alternatives are gaining attention precisely because they resist the urge to become platforms.
The digital planner and note-taking community has a phrase for this: “I just want to write.” It’s not a rejection of technology. It’s a request for technology that respects the act of putting thoughts on a page without turning it into a software workflow.
For anyone building a note-taking or planning tool today, the lesson is clear. Users didn’t fall in love with GoodNotes because it had the longest feature list. They fell in love because it had the shortest distance between thought and ink.
Where Do We Go from Here?
None of this means GoodNotes is a bad app. It remains one of the most capable note-taking applications available, and many of its new features will genuinely serve power users. The cross-platform expansion to Android, Windows, and web is a meaningful step.
But capability and usability are not the same thing. The question GoodNotes needs to answer isn’t “what else can we add?” It’s “what can we protect?”
The best tools in history — from the Moleskine notebook to the original iPod — understood that saying no to features was itself a feature. GoodNotes built its empire on that principle. It would be a shame to watch it forget.
If you’re looking for a note-taking experience that puts Apple Pencil handwriting and simplicity first, you might want to explore alternatives that still honor the “just write” philosophy — apps that believe your planner should feel like a planner, not a productivity suite.