I’ve been a paying Evernote user since May 2010. For most of that time I’ve been happy with it. But almost all of my day-to-day use goes through the Android widget rather than the app itself, and the widget hasn’t kept up.
Four things bother me. None of them are dramatic on their own. Together they add up.
It falls out of sync
Tasks I tick off in the app don’t always disappear from the widget, and tasks I add on the widget don’t always turn up in the app. Not every time, which somehow makes it worse. I never quite trust what I’m looking at.
For something I use specifically to check what needs doing, that’s the one thing that has to work.
Adding a task takes too many steps
You can add a task from the widget, but you can’t give it a due date while you’re there. So you add it, open the app, find the task you just made, and set the date. Three steps for something that should be one.
Doesn’t sound like much. Do it a few thousand times and it does.
There’s no way to filter what it shows
The widget lists every open task regardless of when it’s due. I have around 3,000 of them in there. What I want on my home screen is today and tomorrow. What I get is everything, all the time.
It wastes the space it has
The layout is spaced out enough that only a handful of tasks fit before you have to scroll. On a home screen, fitting things in is more or less the whole job. A denser layout would show me more of what I actually need at a glance.
Why this bugs me
None of this is hard to fix, and that’s the part that nags. I’ve paid for Evernote for well over a decade and built my whole workflow around a widget that seems to get a lot less attention than the app it belongs to.
Your mileage may vary, of course. If you live in the app, none of this will bother you at all.
But Evernote, if you’re reading: for some of us the widget isn’t a side feature. It’s the product.
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