An offline notes app with checklists and no account

Most notes apps are really sync services with an editor on top. That’s useful if you write on a laptop and read on a phone. It’s more than you need for a shopping list, a door code or the thing you want to remember to ask the dentist.

An offline notes app is the other kind: the notes are on your phone and nowhere else. This post looks at what that means in practice, what you give up, how to work around it, and how Shadowkit’s Notes skill is built.

What “offline” should mean

The word gets used loosely, so it helps to separate three things:

Works without a connection. You can open, write and search with no signal. Many synced apps manage this, and catch up later.
Stores notes on the device. The phone holds the notes. A server may also hold a copy.
Never sends them anywhere. There is no server copy at all, and no account, because there is nothing for an account to unlock.

If you’re searching for a notes app without an account, it’s the third you want. A quick test is to open the app for the first time in aeroplane mode and see whether you can write a note before it asks for anything.

What you give up without sync

Being honest about the trade:

Your notes are on one device. A note written on your phone isn’t on your tablet or your laptop.
No shared lists. Two people can’t tick items off the same grocery list from two phones.
No web version. You can’t open your notes in a browser at work.
Lose the phone, lose the notes, unless the phone’s own backup had them.

For some people that settles it, and a synced app is the right choice. For the notes that are short, personal and only ever needed on the phone in your hand, none of the four matters much.

How to live with it

A few habits cover most of the gap.

Share as plain text when a note needs to travel. Text goes anywhere: a message to your partner, an email to yourself, a document on your computer. A checklist shared as text is still readable as a list. You don’t need a shared account to send someone the shopping list. You need a Send button.

Turn on your phone’s backup. Android backs up to your Google account and iOS to iCloud, and both can include an app’s data so that it returns when you set up a new phone. That happens under your own account and settings, not the app maker’s.

Keep long documents somewhere else. A notes app on a phone is for things you capture and look up. A report, a book draft or a shared plan belongs in a tool made for it. Using each for what it’s good at removes most of the wish for sync.

Tidy up now and then. Offline notes are easy to keep short. Delete the list once the shopping is done, and what remains is a small set of notes you actually use.

Shadowkit Notes

Shadowkit is ours. Notes is one of its skills, and it follows the third meaning of offline above: the Android app has no internet permission, there is no account, and the empty Notes screen says “Everything stays on this phone.” We cover the reasoning in why Shadowkit has no account.

Here is what it does.

Text notes and checklists

A note is either text or a checklist, with an optional title. You can switch a note from one to the other at any time: each line of text becomes an item, and each item becomes a line. So you can type a list quickly as text, then turn it into a checklist when you get to the shop.

A conversion never cuts anything. If a note is too long to convert, the app says so and leaves it as it was. And it can be undone for a few seconds afterwards.

No Save button

A note is stored as you type, a moment after you pause. It’s stored again when you leave the note and when the app goes into the background. A note you leave empty is removed instead of piling up as “Untitled”.

Checklists that keep out of the way

Tick an item and it moves down to a Done group, struck through. Open items stay on top, so the list gets shorter as you go. A bar shows progress, such as “3 of 7 done”. Untick all resets the list, which suits a weekly shop or a packing list you reuse.

Pressing Enter in an item starts the next one. An item you empty is removed.

Pin, colour, search

Pin the notes you need to the top of the list.
Give a note one of six colours to tell them apart at a glance.
Search covers titles, text and every checklist item, ticked or not, and marks the match.

Notes are ordered by when their words last changed. Ticking an item, changing a colour or pinning doesn’t count as an edit, so a note doesn’t jump around the list while you shop.

Notes on Home

Notes has its own page on Shadowkit’s Home, a swipe away from the others. Pinned notes come first, then the rest, each as a card. A checklist’s card shows its open items, and you can tick them right there without opening the note.

Every note has Share as text, which hands plain text to your phone’s share sheet. A text note is sent as its title and body. A checklist is sent one item per line, with “[ ]” in front of an open item and “[x]” in front of a ticked one, so it still reads as a list wherever it lands.

Nothing leaves the phone unless you choose where to send it.

Limits, stated plainly

The free version holds 20 notes in a profile. Checklists, colours, pinning, search and sharing are all free. Shadowkit Pro removes the limit.
If Pro ever lapses, nothing is locked or deleted. Every note still opens, edits, ticks and shares. Only adding a new one stops.
A note’s text can be up to 20,000 characters, and a checklist up to 200 items.

What it doesn’t do

No rich text, images or attachments. No folders or tags. No reminders on a note (the Notify skill does reminders, see reminders in plain words). No export of all your notes at once: sharing is one note at a time. And no sync, as above.

If you keep work and personal notes apart, each profile has its own.

Is an offline notes app right for you?

It is if your notes are short, yours alone, and needed on the phone you carry. It isn’t if you write across several devices or share lists with other people every day. Plenty of people use both: a synced app for shared work, and an offline one for everything that’s nobody else’s business.

Shadowkit is coming soon to iOS and Android. Until then, the FAQ answers the common questions.