SteelNote press kit

Fast facts

The pitch, at three lengths

One sentence

One paragraph

Boilerplate

Why it might be worth writing about

The format is the product

Most notes apps offer an export button. SteelNote has no export, because there is nothing to convert: the file on disk is the note. Write a note on your iPhone, open the Files app on the same phone, and the .md file is right there in iCloud Drive, readable in any editor. Delete SteelNote and your writing is untouched. Markdown is now a first class type on Apple platforms, declared system wide as net.daringfireball.markdown, and SteelNote is built natively around it rather than around a proprietary store.

A real Shortcuts and App Intents surface

Notes are exposed to the system as App Intents entities, backed by a local SQLite index, so they are addressable from Shortcuts, Siri and Spotlight. The shipped actions are Create Note, Open Note, Search Notes, Get Note Content, Add to Note, Add to Today, Open Today and Scan. Two are worth singling out: Get Note Content returns a note's text into any other shortcut, and Add to Today appends to the current daily note without opening the app, which makes SteelNote usable as a capture target from anywhere in the system.

Private notes are withheld, not merely hidden

Marking a note private is enforced at the data layer rather than in the interface. The note is kept out of the Spotlight index, out of the Siri and Shortcuts note picker, and out of the Transferable representation that is the bridge to Apple Intelligence, so its text is never handed over when a user asks the system about a note. The check fails closed: if the private flag cannot be read, the note is withheld.

Switching is treated as a feature, not a chore

SteelNote imports from Bear, Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Apple Notes, plus Markdown, TextBundle, Word, RTF, PDF and CSV, keeping folder structure intact.

Sync is never paywalled

Sync runs on the user's own iCloud, so it costs the developer nothing to provide and is included in every plan, including during the trial. Holding a person's own notes hostage to a subscription is a choice, and this app does not 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

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What SteelNote does not do yet

Worth knowing before you write, so nothing surprises you:

• It cannot yet point at an existing folder or vault. SteelNote keeps its own directory. Obsidian users can import a vault, which copies it rather than opening it in place. Pointing the app at an arbitrary folder is on the roadmap, deliberately after 1.0, because it should not be shipped until it is safe.
• There is no web or Android version, and none is planned. The files are portable even though the app is not.
• No collaboration or shared notes. This is a single person's library, synced across that person's devices.

Review access

Write to contact@steelnoteapp.com and you will get a lifetime code, so you can use every feature without paying and without a subscription expiring in the middle of writing. Happy to answer technical questions about how the sync, the index or the intents actually work.

Credit

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