App anxiety, a few thoughts

I used to be a big Evernote user, always looking for a product I can invest my time in long term, their quest to become a 100 year startup felt right. Time passed, they fell short on promises to improve the editor and changed focus introducing features like Work Chat 🤷.

This was a couple of years back, and I still haven’t found a good replacement I feel comfortable with. Finding the balance between beautiful functional app and one which let’s you own you’re data is getting really difficult.

I find it hard to invest in new applications . The majority of great new software is developed by startups or individuals, which means it’s likely to fall short eventually, a few common reasons:

• Being acquired by a competitor who want’s to EOL it (Sparrow, etc)
• Just being shutdown (Google reader)
• Startups fail
• Startups pivot!

This leads to anxiety when picking software, there is a load of great tools out there that I’m hesitant to invest time in. They create walled gardens, making it difficult to move your data out, and when you do it’s not going to match your expectations (e.g Evernote to markdown).

Guess I’ll just keep moving my data around until it eventually falls apart 👍