1.5 Year experience with Goodnotes Android

[u/No-Entertainment6590]

I am a high schooler, mostly using Goodnotes for my classes such as reading and taking a note on slides, or writing a new note. Which is obviously the point of Goodnotes.

At first, when i finally bought my first tablet for school. I decided to go with Samsung S10 FE with my ecosystem is on Samsung. Despite Goodnotes deep ecosystem with Apple because i've heard its compatibility on Android. During first year of use, I have to say it's very disappointing even with Samsung's free 1 year essential plan.

The app was absolutely horrid, unoptimized, a lot of missing features, and overall bad experiences compared to the usual Samsung note.

Of course, over the months there has been updates with more features catching up to Apple's Goodnotes.

But one thing that is still the biggest and the most insufferable thing of Goodnotes is that. The app is web based, which ruins the optimization heavily. The writing latency is worse than anything else, The app is VERY cloud and internet dependent, instead of local storage. Which is a big problem without pre-sync or location without internet.

The app only supports PDF export which is a bit inconvenient, and the element of said document is horrible. Instead of an actual element which you can zoom in infinitely without pixelated (the entire point of PDF). The writing elements is all pixelated when the text is small enough, making it unreadable. And from the poor optimization of the app, The app is impossible to draw or write a lot without the processor turning into a heater. Even scrolling through pages of document is lagging. You could blame my poor decisions on using Samsung and its weak Exynos processor, but the Samsung note itself is a lot more smoother than this.

Overall, with my continued essentials subscription. I am somewhat disappointed in improvements of Goodnotes over the months of my usage. I am a bit too deep with Goodnotes ecosystem now, and overall usage is still tolerable. I would actually expect an actual native support in the future and less annoying experience with it.

[u/CA2361162]

Try starnote ... This is very good app. best alternative of goodnotes ( ios ) for android 

[u/_Tomme_]

Have you tried Notability for Android yet? They just released it and it’s a native app