Notes App Android Picks, Judged By Store Data

Samsung Notes has a billion downloads, 14.6 million reviews, a 4.8 rating, and its Play Store listing says it was last updated on 23 September 2025.

Ten months. Every other major notes app Android users are pointed at got an update inside the last eight weeks, and I pulled all of those dates off the store pages myself on 28 July 2026 rather than trusting a roundup.

Here's the fast answer if you want one. Google Keep is free, updated constantly, and fine for most people. Samsung Notes is better if you own the pen. Obsidian is the one that keeps your files as files. Evernote's free plan is now 50 notes on one device, which is worth knowing before you install it. Everything below is the store data behind those calls, plus the caps nobody quotes.

What The Store Page Tells You And The Roundups Skip

Every comparison article ranks these apps by features. Feature lists come from marketing pages. The Play Store publishes a different set of facts that are harder to spin, so I collected those instead.

Before anyone writes in about the Samsung row, I should say the obvious thing. Samsung ships that app through Galaxy Store as well, and preinstalled apps often get updated through the phone's own system update rather than through Play, so a stale Play listing isn't proof of an abandoned app. It is proof that the version a non-Samsung phone would install has sat still for ten months, which matters if you were planning to use Samsung Notes on a Pixel.

The Ratings Argue With The Recommendations

Sort that table by rating instead of by fame and the order stops matching any roundup I've read.

ColorNote sits at 4.9 across 3.96 million reviews. That is the highest score on the list, from a sample size larger than most of these apps have downloads, and I have never once seen it recommended in a best-notes-app article. Meanwhile Evernote, which appears in essentially every list, holds 3.5 from 1.85 million reviews.

Obsidian is the other interesting one, at 4.1 from 17.9 thousand reviews. It's the app that technical people evangelise hardest and it rates below a free notepad with adverts in it.

I don't think ratings measure quality. They measure the distance between what someone expected and what they got, which is why a simple app that does one thing scores high and a powerful app with a learning curve scores lower. Evernote's 3.5 is probably measuring people who remember a more generous free plan, not people who think the software is broken.

Still. If eleven roundups tell you Evernote and four million reviewers give it a C, one of those signals is worth checking directly.

Free Means Six Different Things

The word free is doing an enormous amount of work in this category, and the versions of it are not close to equivalent.

The Evernote row is the one that should stop you. One sync device on the free plan means the app works on your phone or on your laptop, and choosing is the free tier. Fifty notes is roughly a fortnight for anyone who takes notes seriously.

Joplin's prices are in euros because that's the currency their pricing page served me, and I'm not converting it, because a conversion I did in my head at today's rate would be a number no reader can verify. If you want dollars, open the page yourself and see what it gives you.

Obsidian's row is my favourite kind of pricing. The app is free with nothing metered, and the thing you can pay for is getting your notes onto a second device. Which is honest, at least, since that's genuinely the expensive part to run.

Adverts In A Note App

Two apps on that list carry the Contains Ads badge or the In-App Purchases badge, and one carries both.

The both-badges app is Notepad, Notes, Easy Notebook by Simple Design, which sits at the top of the search results for this query with 10 million downloads and a 4.8 rating. It's a perfectly reasonable notepad. It also shows you advertising in the place where you keep your thoughts, and I find that a strange thing to have normalised.

Google Keep, Samsung Notes, OneNote, Evernote, Obsidian, Simplenote, Joplin and Standard Notes carry neither badge on their listings. That's a genuinely useful filter and it takes about four seconds per app to check, because the badges sit directly under the app name on the store page.

The reason a free notepad needs adverts is that somebody has to pay for the developer's time, and if it isn't you it's an ad network. Nothing sinister. Just worth being deliberate about, particularly for an app you'll leave open while writing down things you'd rather not have profiled.

Two Apps Called Samsung Notes

If you have a Galaxy device, Samsung Notes is likely already installed and it is a different product from the one a Pixel owner would download.

Samsung's own support page lists the features you get on a Galaxy phone, tablet or Galaxy Book. Handwriting that can be moved and converted to text with the S Pen. Export to PowerPoint or Word. PDF import and annotation. Folders and subfolders. Collaboration with up to nine other people on the same note. Sync with Microsoft OneNote. On Galaxy AI devices there's automatic formatting, summaries, spell checking, translation and voice memo transcription.

That's a lot of app for zero dollars, and the AI features being included rather than sold as a credit pack is unusual in this category. The catch is the hardware. Those features are attached to Samsung devices, so the app is only half an answer to "notes app Android" unless the Android in question is a Galaxy.

I've gone into what happens when you leave that ecosystem over in the Samsung notes app piece, because the export story deserves its own arithmetic.

Picking By What You Actually Do

The row I'd push back on is the Obsidian one, and I say that as someone whose own notes are Markdown files. It's 4.1 on the store for a reason. On a phone it's slower and fiddlier than Keep, and if the phone is where you actually write, the file-ownership argument is winning you a principle and costing you the habit.

What I Run, Which Is Barely An App

My notes are Markdown files sitting next to the projects they belong to, in one repository, opened in whatever editor is already in front of me. On a phone that means a text editor and a synced folder, which is not a system anybody should copy.

The reason it stayed that way is worth more than the setup. I once had a site sitting at average position 47 in Search Console for months, which means indexed and never seen by a human being, and I spent that whole stretch making things better instead of making them findable. Improving the tool felt like work. It wasn't.

App selection in this category has the same flavour. Comparing eleven notes apps is pleasant and legible and produces a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is not the notes. I'd rather you installed the wrong one today than the right one in three weeks.

If you want the version of that argument with real money attached, the productivity apps breakdown adds up what a full stack of these subscriptions costs in a year, and the total is the part that changes minds.

Questions People Ask

What's the best free notes app for Android? Google Keep for most people, on the basis that it's genuinely free, it was updated yesterday, and it's tied to an account you already have rather than a new one.

Does Google Keep count against my Drive storage? I looked for a clear statement on Google's own support page and didn't find one, so I'm not going to assert either way. Attachments are the part I'd expect to consume quota, and I'd test it with a large image before relying on the answer.

Is Samsung Notes available on non-Samsung phones? It's on the Play Store, which is why it appears in these results. The Play listing hasn't been updated since September 2025, and the headline features are tied to Galaxy hardware and Galaxy AI, so I'd treat a non-Samsung install as a downgrade rather than a port.

Which Android notes app works offline? Obsidian and Joplin by design, since the notes are files on the device. The cloud-first apps cache locally and sync later, which works fine until a conflict, and conflict handling is the thing none of them advertise.

How do I move notes out later? That's the question I'd ask before installing anything, and it's covered properly in the Android notes application piece, which is about where these apps put your data rather than which one to pick.

The Short Version

Install Google Keep. Use it for a month. If nothing about it annoys you, you're done and you saved yourself an evening.

If something does annoy you, the annoyance will name the app you actually needed, and it'll be one specific thing rather than a general sense that better software exists somewhere. That sense is always there. It's rarely accurate.