SteelNote press kit

Why I built it

On 28 April 2026, Tiago Forte posted asking for a dead simple notes app based on Markdown files. Obsidian was too complicated for him; he wanted Apple Notes with Markdown storage. The thread got 741 replies and none of them worked for me either.

I had been annoyed by the same thing for years without being able to name it. I started building the following week. I am Claude Bezeaud, I work alone in France, and I wrote all of it.

Fast facts

Copy you can lift

Third person on purpose, so you can paste it as is.

A paragraph

Boilerplate

Five things that might be worth a paragraph

There is no export button

Nothing to convert: the file on disk is the note. Write something on your iPhone, open the Files app on the same phone, and the .md file is there under On My iPhone, a few hundred bytes, readable by anything. Leaving means copying a folder. Apple now declares Markdown system wide as net.daringfireball.markdown, so this is no longer a niche position.

Shortcuts, Siri and Spotlight

Notes are App Intents entities backed by a local SQLite index, so Shortcuts, Siri and Spotlight address them directly. No companion app, no URL scheme. Shipped actions: Create Note, Open Note, Search Notes, Get Note Content, Add to Note, Add to Today and Open Today. Three more are Controls rather than actions, for Control Centre, the Lock Screen and the Action Button: Scan, Daily Note and Search.

Two do the real work. Get Note Content hands a note's text to any other shortcut, and Add to Today appends a line without opening the app.

Private notes stay out of Apple Intelligence

Privacy is enforced in the data layer, not the interface. A private note stays out of widgets and out of the Transferable representation that bridges to Apple Intelligence, so its text is never handed over. The check fails closed: if the flag cannot be read, the note is withheld. I would rather show too little than leak something someone marked. It is still a plain file, though: like any file on the device, it can turn up by name in system search.

What it imports

Bear, Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Apple Notes, plus Markdown, TextBundle, Word, RTF, PDF and CSV. Folder structure survives. This was the dullest part of the whole project to write and it is the part that decides whether anyone can actually leave their old app.

Sync is included, in every plan

Sync runs on the user's own iCloud, which costs me nothing to provide, so it is included everywhere including during the trial. Charging a subscription for access to someone's own notes is a decision, and I did not want to make it.

Screenshots

iPhone, 1290 by 2796. Click any image for the full resolution file. Free to use with credit to SteelNote.

The proof. The Files app on the same iPhone: every note is its own file, a few hundred bytes each. The same note opened outside the app: ordinary Markdown, readable by anything. One note: table, image, checklist, wiki links and tags. All of it plain text on disk. The notes list, with folders, tags and previews. Any line in any note can become a task. They gather in one list. Wiki links and backlinks, built from the files themselves. The library: daily notes, tasks, links, folders and tags. A daily note per day, each one an ordinary dated file.

iPad and Mac screenshots are available on request.

App icon

Light Dark Tinted

What it does not do yet

You would find these out anyway:

• It cannot point at an existing folder or vault. SteelNote keeps its own directory, and importing an Obsidian vault copies it rather than opening it in place. On the roadmap, after 1.0, because it touches people's files and should not ship early.
• No web or Android version, and none planned. The files are portable even though the app is not.
• No collaboration or shared notes. One person's library, on that person's devices.

Review access

Email contact@steelnoteapp.com for a lifetime code, so nothing expires while you are still writing. Happy to go into detail on how the sync, the index or the intents work, including where they are weak.

Credit

Please credit screenshots and the icon to SteelNote. The name is written as one word with a capital S and a capital N.