We’ve Got Big News: Notability Cloud is Here!

We’ve been working on something huge behind the scenes. It’s one of the biggest technical upgrades we’ve ever done, and it’s all to make your note-taking experience smoother, faster, and more collaborative than ever before. 

We’ve rebuilt our syncing and storage system from the ground up. Your notes are now stored on Notability Cloud, our very own cloud storage infrastructure, custom-built for everything you love about Notability.

This is a major change for our platform and we can’t wait for you to experience Notability like never before. Our new system brings instantaneous syncing, richer collaboration, and powerful new features that we’ll be rolling out in the near future. Let’s walk through what’s new and what you can expect. 👇

You asked, we listened

We’ve heard from you that seamless syncing is one of your feature requests. In previous versions of Notability, if you made edits to your note on your iPad, and then opened the same note on your iPhone, sometimes your edits didn’t match. And if your iPad crashed mid-edit, data loss was always a scary possibility. 😬

That’s all changing now. With your notes now living on Notability’s own servers, syncing is faster. This new, resilient system is tailored to your unique needs for digital note-taking and productivity. 

‍Here’s what’s coming your way

• Cross-platform access: Your notes are no longer limited to Apple devices! You can now view and edit your notes on the Notability web app, available on any laptop, with more platforms to come. 👀 Our web app includes the same powerful features offered on our iOS app, including unlimited note creation, document import and annotation, audio-to-text transcription, and Notability Learn✨, our AI-powered study feature. We have more web app features on the way, so stay tuned.
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• Efficient storage: We developed new technology to efficiently store rich content like handwriting ink and greatly reduce its storage space. With this space-saving format, you and your friends can go wild with your annotations and edits, all while enjoying faster collaboration.

“We know handwriting ink is super important to our customers, so we spent a bunch of time making a really efficient encoding for ink. As a result, ink-based notes now take significantly less disk space in our new system.”

– Garrett Mitchell, CTO

• Version history & recovery: Every version of your notes will be tracked with rich data recovery also available. If your cat walks across your device and accidentally enters multiple keyboard smashes, you’ll be able to go back in time and recover all previous versions of your note.
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• Multi-user editing: You’ll soon be able to collaborate live with friends on the same note. Currently, Notability makes it easy to share documents by exporting as an external document or image. With our new system, you'll be able to invite your friends or co-workers as collaborators by link and see their changes from your device right as they happen.
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• Real-time syncing: Let’s say you want to type up notes on the Notability web app, then sketch a diagram on your iPad underneath. All your changes will now save to your devices instantly. You'll no longer have to periodically save your work and wait for it to sync on another device. Even if you’re offline, your notes will automatically sync on your devices the next time you’re connected. This multi-device ecosystem is perfect for when you're on the go.

How we got here

Notability Cloud has been years in the making for our team. Our engineers started working on this project in 2023 to give you the incredible new features that you’ll love. Building an entire syncing and cloud-based storage infrastructure isn’t easy, especially for a complex data model like ours:

A single hand drawn stroke in your notes can be made up of thousands of smaller strokes. A single note? Millions. Add in multiple edits, annotations, and erases, and you have a lot of data flying around.

Our smarter cloud storage system uses a number of engineering techniques like relative encoding to shrink that data. This way, your edits take up less space and transmit quickly over the internet, as if everyone is in the same room. All of these changes are to help you learn and collaborate seamlessly, not deal with tech headaches.

What’s next for you?

This new backend opens up so many possibilities for us and you, including new features in live collaboration, web app access (already live in beta), and faster innovations with our new technology stack. We’ll also be integrating Apple's Writing Tools into Notability! Powered by Apple Intelligence, these tools will help you proofread, adjust tone, or even rewrite your notes.

When will you see the changes?

We’ll roll out this new syncing system in early August for all new users, and then move to our existing users afterwards.

Let’s do this

This is the start of an exciting new chapter for Notability. We’re thrilled about what this change allows us to accomplish today, and even more thrilled about what it sets up for us to build tomorrow. 

Thanks for being part of this journey with us! Keep an eye on our blog and socials for updates. Things are about to get a lot more collaborative. 😉