FoldNotes for iPhone & iPad Is Here
FoldNotes for iPhone and iPad is on the App Store today, and it’s free.
It has been a long road to this post. FoldNotes started on the Mac as an answer to a specific frustration: outliners that own your data, and markdown editors that treat structure as decoration. Folding sits between the two — your notes stay plain markdown files you could open in any editor, but you can collapse a section you’re not working on and let the rest of the document breathe.
That idea turned out to matter more on a phone than on a Mac.
Why folding earns its keep on a small screen
A 4,000-word note on a 27-inch display is a scroll. On a phone it’s a labyrinth.
Folding changes the arithmetic. Collapse the sections you’re not in and a long note becomes a table of contents you can actually read — tap a heading to open it, tap again to put it away. The document you’re navigating is the same file sitting in iCloud Drive; nothing has been reorganised, summarised or moved. You’re just choosing what to look at.
The same goes for tasks. Tasks live inside your notes rather than in a separate app, which means the task and the paragraph explaining it never drift apart. On the Mac that’s a convenience. On a phone — standing in a queue, ticking off the one thing you actually came to do — it’s the whole point.
What you get
- Folding, on every heading and indented block, exactly as on the Mac.
- Inline tasks with due dates and priorities, and a task circle showing progress at a glance.
- Tags and
[[backlinks]]— the same personal knowledge graph, readable on the move. - iCloud sync over plain markdown files. Edit on the Mac, pick up on the phone, no proprietary format and no lock-in.
- Daily notes, so the day’s thinking has somewhere to land.
- Widgets for your tasks and recent notes, straight on the home screen.
iPad gets a little extra: regex search with a saved-pattern library, which the iPhone leaves out for form-factor reasons.
Requirements: iOS or iPadOS 17 and later.
Your notes stay yours
Worth restating, because it’s the part that doesn’t change with the platform. FoldNotes stores your notes as plain markdown files in iCloud Drive. No account. No server of ours in the middle. Nothing about your notes reaches us — we couldn’t read them if we wanted to, because they never leave your devices and your iCloud account.
If you ever want out, there’s nothing to export. They’re already files.
What about the Mac?
The Mac app is still in beta, and it’s where the deepest features live — the gallery, the task board, live preview, Zen mode, and the fn command line tool for scripting your notes. It’ll be a paid app when it ships; iOS stays free.
If you want the Mac beta, sign up on the Mac beta page and we’ll send you a signed build with automatic updates.
Thank you
To everyone who ran the TestFlight builds, filed the awkward bug reports, and told me plainly when something felt wrong: this release is materially better for it. Several of the fixes in the shipping build came directly from testers who took the time to describe exactly what they’d done before it broke. That’s the useful kind of bug report and it’s rarer than it should be.
If you use FoldNotes and it fits, a rating on the App Store genuinely helps a small independent app get found.
And if something’s broken or missing, tell me — [email protected].