I replaced Apple Notes, Google Keep, and OneNote with Obsidian, and its biggest mobile flaw is finally gone

For most of us, our notes are divided between two or more apps and we don't really think twice about it. A case in point is the average phone which will have a hodgepodge of Apple Notes, Google Keep, and OneNote. Those come with the hardware or the Google and Microsoft accounts that are already active. That's fine for capturing quick thoughts, but it can be hard to make sense of one afterwards when it's in an app by itself and the context is somewhere else.

If the goal is to put everything in one pot, Obsidian is a very decent option. Its desktop app has been my go-to for a while now, and I also more recently started using the mobile app. But the mobile version is where the promise wanes. There is something about it that drives people back to the very apps they wanted to abandon, and that's the inability for quick capture on certain devices. Well, Obsidian finally fixed it.

Obsidian still beats the apps with proprietary formats

It doesn't lock you in

Apple Notes, Google Keep, and OneNote all keep your notes inside the app itself. Obsidian saves everything as plain Markdown files in a folder on your device, so any text editor can open them. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, the notes would still be safe and sound in that folder.

Google Keep is probably one of the tools I leaned on most for quick capture because it's pretty fast and easy to navigate most of the time, so I'll give it that. At the same time, it has no folders or subfolders, just labels, and you can only have 50 labels. Mine turned into one long scroll of colored cards that I ended up searching through instead of actually browsing, which got old pretty quickly.

OneNote at least has real structure, but it stores notes in only a format Microsoft can read, and there's still no Markdown export as of 2026. Apple Notes picked up Markdown export with iOS 26, which is a nice addition, but that conversion only happens when you export or import - the rest of the time your notes aren't in Markdown at all, and the app is still built around Apple's devices.

This type of lock-in is the exact reason why so many switch over to local options like Obsidian - not only are your notes not exactly private, but you have a couple of export and conversion steps to go through. Obsidian gets around a lot of that with its own importer, which handles all three apps and turns each note into a Markdown file in your vault.

Obsidian had a mobile problem

But it finally got fixed

Obsidian on a phone has always had a bit of a UX problem. Tapping the app kicks off a whole loading sequence for your vault and plugins before you can actually type. And the larger your vault is, the longer the wait.

It isn't an iPhone thing, either. The Obsidian forums have years of threads about slow starts on both platforms, like an Android user whose 213-file vault was taking around 11 seconds just to read its files. Over on iOS, people describe a blank screen after the system puts the app to sleep. There are many of these types of reports, and most of them pretty much matched my own issue with the app too. So, quick notes ended up going to Google Keep or Apple Notes.

Obsidian's answer to this was Quick Capture. It was released in early access in September, then went public with 1.14 in October. On iOS 26, it lets you write a note from the Lock Screen, Control Center, Home Screen widgets, or Shortcuts without waiting for the vault to load. The catch is that it's iPhone-only for now. Android's part of 1.14 was smaller, including an Open Note widget that now shows the note's name.

How Quick Capture transformed my Obsidian workflow on mobile

I don't have Sync, which makes it the perfect workflow for Quick Capture

You can start by setting it up in the control center, which now has a set of Obsidian controls, including Quick Note, New Note, Daily Note, and Search. Quick Note is the one you want for this quick capture setup. Add your picks as their own controls, and hitting any one of them will take you straight to the Obsidian app.

Quick Note, specifically, opens an empty screen with a "your new thought…" prompt and the keyboard already up - Obsidian says it launches faster than the iOS animation takes to finish. If I lock the phone halfway through, the note stays reachable through a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.

Where the capture goes depends on Locations, which you pick from a button at the top of that screen. A Location gets a name and a vault, then a Behavior. The behavior dictates whether the capture becomes its own note or gets added to something (either today's daily note or a specific note you pick). Optional settings cover the folder and template, plus a toggle to open the note after capturing, and titles are automatic by default, which in my case meant the date and time stamped on the front. Mine is called Inbox and makes a new note every time.

I don't pay for Obsidian Sync, so my phone vault has never matched my desktop vaults, which meant I never used Obsidian on my phone nearly as much. Now that the user experience is much quicker, I have no reason not to use it. Every capture is a plain Markdown file, so getting the useful ones onto my PC simply involves capturing them quickly on my phone, then transferring them to myself when I have time.

My phone vault finally stopped collecting dust

Funny thing is, the update didn't touch much of what people actually like about Obsidian. The editor is the same, and the links and plugins all work how they always did. I think the slow start was the main reason three other apps were in my rotation in the first place. Quick Notes really changed the note-taking game for me on mobile - Android users are still waiting on their version, and hopefully that doesn't take too long.