The Slow Death of Simplenote | zoia.org

Simplenote is a fast, lightweight app for taking notes, with just the essentials: basic text editing, syncing across devices, and the option to share notes for collaboration with other Simplenote users.

Fred Cheng and Mike Johnston created the first version of Simplenote in 2008. While building the product, they developed a sync engine. This sync engine would become the basis for Simperium, their cross-platform data syncing service.

Simplenote became popular because of its straightforward features and it’s core strength: syncing notes among devices. But Simperium core product was their syncing backend. Plain-text editing apps like Notional Velocity/nvALT, ResophNotes, nvPY, and others offered synchronization through Simperium’s API.

In 2013, Simperium was acquired Automattic1, the company behind WordPress and other products. At that time, WordPress used XML-RPC for syncing between WordPress sites and the WordPress mobile app, so you could write or edit content for your website on your mobile device. But XML-RPC was slow.

Simperium’s acquisition made sense for Automattic because Simperium’s protocol had been developed with mobile in mind. It was simple, and it was fast. Also, it didn’t rely on iCloud, Dropbox, or other proprietary synchronization technologies.

Simperium’s founders announced the acquisition on the Simplenote’s blog. Among other things, they wrote:

You know how sometimes, the services you love just disappear when they’re bought by someone else? Or they wither and die a slow and painful death? Not the case here. We made sure of that.

According to this FastCompany article, Automattic had plans for Simperium to be a solid syncing alternative anywhere online syncing was needed:

To Mullenweg and the Automattic team, keeping Simperium available to developers is just as important as using it to enhance WordPress and its mobile apps. Ultimately, the company strives to provide not just a content management system, but a growing amount of the fabric of the web itself. Just as Automattic products like Akismet and Gravatar are utilized well beyond the confines of WordPress, the company wants to power cross-platform content synchronization wherever it’s needed online.

“We try to invest in technologies that we think are intrinsically good, regardless of whether there’s a short-term business model or whether it looks just like what we’ve done before,” says Mullenweg. “As we roll out the Simperium API and scale up that infrastructure for more and more of the Internet to use, I think that it will make the Internet a better place. Because it’s just a more efficient approach to how to program these things. So if more people, including ourselves, use these approaches, the Internet will be faster and more pleasant to use.”

Simplenote was iOS-only. After the acquisition, Automattic released versions for Android, Windows, and Linux. The app’s source code was published under the GPLv2 open source license. They removed ads and the premium tier from the app, and took care of running the sync server for free for Simplenote users.

The other promises, however, never materialized. I understand that Automattic uses Simperium’s tech for several of their apps, but the Simperium API was never available at scale for the general public. By 2020, Automattic was no longer accepting new third-party app use of the Simperium API.

As of today, Simperium’s public-facing pages have been frozen for a decade.

* * *

I’ve been using Simplenote for ten years at least. I use it for jotting down ideas, or for working on shared notes with my wife.

Some time ago, I began to notice sporadic problems. Sometimes, the shopping list for the grocery store I wrote on my laptop wouldn’t sync with my cellphone, no matter what I tried. Other times, when I opened a note on my cellphone, it opened an old version, which instantly replaced the new version on all devices. One time, I opened Simplenote and there were no notes! Or the laptop app said I needed to login—even if I was logged in—but when I logged in again my lastest changes were lost.

Those problems fixed mostly by themselves after an hour or two, but I ended up using Simplenote just for temporary, ephemeral notes.

A couple of days ago, again, Simplenote on my cellphone refused to sync to the latest version of a note. I searched for a solution on the internet, asked Claude for help… and then found this message from 2025 on Simplenote’s support forum:

We appreciate your continued use of Simplenote and the support of our community over the years. Simplenote is no longer in active development, and while the app remains available, only its basic functionality is being maintained at this time. No new features or enhancements are planned.

I haven’t been able to find an official statement on Automattic’s plans for Simplenote. However, it’s...