Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

To be fair, the news didn't get a ton of interest here last week:

    Apple is reportedly going to rename all of its operating systems (theverge.com)
    13 points by thesuperbigfrog 7 days ago | 7 comments

-- via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44120560

I also thought the article would be a joke about an obvious feature never arriving.

>Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19?

It's speculation at the moment (macrumors.com), it hasn't been officially announced yet.

I looked for April 1st as a date. Next thought: the "news" is about an LLM writing these articles and messed something up.

But thanks for clarifying!

> Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19?

I only found out yesterday if that helps. Makes some kind of sense now they're on a regular yearly update cycle.

I’m pretty sure Samsung did the same with their S series phones a few years back. Nobody seemed to mind.

19 + 7 = 26, lucky number 7!

Nobody knows yet, it's just a rumour. But year-based versioning makes sense as these products continue to develop and the version numbers get higher. Even as an iOS developer, I've lost track of the phone versions at this point. Year-based versioning would be so much easier. Saying that I hope it's "iOS '26" and not "iOS 26".

Is critical thinking really so dead that people take rumors to be the truth?

You can get at them with AppleScript. I wrote a tool for that a while ago: https://github.com/dogsheep/apple-notes-to-sqlite

You can connect iOS Notes with any IMAP server. This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio) but does allow for self-hosting.

I love Apple Notes for being easy and “just works” within the Apple Ecosystem. Easy to share with family, notes updated across devices, etc.

Markdown support is a nice addition and hope this makes it easy to transfer notes with other app faster and an intact formatting across the journey.

However, I use it as a starting entry point for my notes, which are mostly temporary, rough, and ephemeral. These notes are the ones I won’t mind losing and can walk out. Anything important or critical that is added here is eventually moved to a plain-text note (Markdown) elsewhere.

https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/

I just use it like I would a physical notepad. Throwaway notes, shopping lists, measurements, etc.

I use Obsidian these days, I found the switch from Apple Notes pain free. I still think Apple Notes is a great app for almost everyone. Not perfect but really good.

https://sixcolors.com/member/2021/01/export-your-apple-notes...

https://zapier.com/blog/export-apple-notes/

There are ways to export, definitely not as straightforward as other tools.

I've been using this app for years to export Apple Notes to markdown backups (no affiliation, just a user): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter/id1099120373

> There is no way to export these notes with their metadata and media intact without using iCloud.

You can have an Apple Notes folder backed by IMAP which lets you get at the notes as `multipart/related; type="text/html"` emails (including media). I use it on my servers for family-controlled email allow/deny lists.

(Definitely more faff to deal with than something like Obsidian or Joplin's Markdown notes though.)

I’ve used my google account for notes for years. The earliest one looks like it was around 2014. Have you tried adding an email address from a platform that supports notes?

Just a sidenote: you can use Git in iOS as well if you are brave enough.

E.g. with Obsidian your notes are stored into specific directory and it stores files as Markdown in hierarchical way. Then mount this app-specific directory to iSH and use git. Downside is that automatic syncing can be difficult since there is limited amount of time iSH can run in the background.

I have the opposite experience.

I try other systems and then I end up wanting the simplicity of notes.

Unfortunately Joplin is too slow for a niche of short fast notes, but even then better to get another app without a lock in

From the article:

“Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple Notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years.”

Am I misunderstanding or is that the feature you were asking for? If not then what does the article mean by export?

From the article: "The feature would allow users to export text in the markdown format".

Agree. iOS notes is only good for throwaway thoughts or ephemeral notes

It took “only” 20 years

It's not a coincidence at all. Markdown is the "native" language for most LLMs, and the hype around it requires even low-level tools to support it (for both legitimate and marketing reasons)

I thought this was huge news so I posted it here and it got no eyes.

I wish they stopped adding feature to notepad. Or if they really wanted to, create a new app note.exe and add features to it instead.

Quite honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. It’s been 21 years since one of their biggest evangelists wrote the format!

It sounded to me like a joke, as in “markdown will be supported on February 30th”. Then I read the article text, which seemed serious, and I was confused.

They must be doing version numbers based on marketing. From OS X, to macOS 11...15, and now macOS 26.

You mean you don't bump your semver by 8 major versions when you add markdown exports?

They haven't officially announced it.

As another commenter said, they haven't officially announced it yet. That said, it's all I've heard about in the Apple world for the last couple of days¹, so it may just be that you don't follow Apple news closely.

¹ well that and the iOS redesign.

Apple Shortcuts already has a Rich Text to Markdown converter out of the box. It was already a quick jump to Markdown using only built-in Apple tools, but maybe this will be a cleaner export.

I’ve been converting from Apple Notes to Obsidian and it’s been pretty painful. Everything is just slightly off, in inconsistent ways, where I need to clean up every note manually. I’m deep enough into it that adding the feature now won’t do me much good, but might be helpful if I want to use notes for quick capture and then maybe export to Obsidian if I want to save it.

I should probably go back to Notational Velocity, but am spoiled by iCloud. It’s effectively the perfect scratch pad notes app. Markdown for all content, search is also document creation, great key bindings, sorting by all relevant fields, and fast.

> This is only to export in markdown, not directly write in markdown.

Oof, I got really excited about this for half a day or so...

Maybe worth changing the headline?

I thought it was just a typo, but I assume they've switched to years? Please tell me this won't end up like the Xbox naming scheme.

Me too, me too.

You hate reading unrendered markdown? I've looked at markdown so much that my brain renders it in my head.

Bear’s implementation is great. One thing I hate about rich text is that it's basically impossible to not inherit the formatting of adjacent text if you move your cursor around, nor is it possible to see the current formatting state. If your cursor is between whitespace and an italic word, will inserted text be normal or italic? Markdown’s formatting characters solve this by creating a boundary that the cursor can be on either side of.

I tend to copy Markdown content from other sources into Apple Notes. Being able to paste into Notes and have it format in the view is a big win.

It is possible reporting is getting this wrong and the Markdown feature and it is just to serve use case above. As an example, Google Docs recently enabled "Paste from Markdown" that also is a huge convenience.

Apple Notes is used not only with onscreen keyboards in iOS, but also with physical keyboards in iPadOS and macOS, where familiarity with Markdown input could make it faster than shortcut commands.

I think it’s user preference. For me it’s easier to get to the punctuation asterisk (basically muscle memory and <0.5s) than to tap the formatting menu, wait for the keyboard sheet to go down and the formatting sheet to go up, tap Bold, then tap the X and wait for animations to complete again (which I have no muscle memory for and need to look at every UI element that I’m tapping).

But formatting already-typed text on iOS is incredibly fiddly (as you have to select a text span first, and iOS fights you every step of the way when you do this — especially if the span starts or stops at something iOS doesn't consider a "whole token.")

Meanwhile, inserting punctuation representing formatting into already-typed text, merely requires placing the insertion caret, which is much less fiddly.

Current

   - Tap Aa
 - Tap Italic
 - Tap close
 - Type
 - Tap Aa
 - Tap Italic (to reset)
 - Tap close

    - Hold a key to insert asterisk
    - Type
    - Hold a key to insert asterisk

Markdown export would be appreciated. My number one concern with Notes is that it is 100% opaque file formats (weird serialisation inside SQLite and no api). Backup to markdown would be great.

[dead]

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-mar...

so very useless

I'm sorry, are you saying that you sent all your notes to ChatGPT as prompts? How do you recall or get your notes back?

> I take all of my notes on ChatGPT now

I can't even imagine what this even means.

I’m also interested in what you mean of how you get your notes back. Sounds interesting.

This link has the actual info: https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/28/ios-26-coming-next-month/

They are rebranding it to reflect the year, à la FIFA 26

>and praying for LaTeX support too

This gave me the belly laugh I needed, thanks!

Bear's support of embedded things like pictures and especially PDFs is atrocious compared to Notes, unfortunately.

I think apple cares a lot less than it used to and it’s been like that for a while. There are long standing bugs or missing features on iOS that are just there and have been for years.

I guess they don’t have to try as hard anymore, so they don’t.

Shift+Option+Command V pastes plain text on macOS.

I absolutely agree. I use it daily but it's so buggy and the search is the worst thing about it!

Seems to be the way with lots of apps Apple produces these days. They do the bare minimum, leave them a decade then quietly add in a feature that should've existed on day one and likely took a single dev a couple of hours to add support for.

Have you tried the handwriting recognition? It’ll take you all the way to the newton.

It is really incredible how Apple has obviously broken and buggy UX in many primary use cases on their devices, and fail to fix it for generations.

The iPad is particularly bad in this respect. For a decade it would not support the most obvious use case for a device like this: Have it in portrait mode like a notebook, show a video or book app on the top half and notes app on the bottom half. A use case that was solved by the original Macintosh. The most infuriating thing was that you could split the vertical screen into two useless, thing vertical strips---a configuration I have never seen any use case for. Even today now that there is some more configurability and you can vaguely put two apps in this configuration, there is still massive wasted space on the sides and the apps overlap.

I think the fact it's buggy but you still use it daily (when there are so many other options) goes to show how good it is! Personally it's the app I use more than any other. I don't run in to too many issues but I have experienced the one you mention about text disappearing. On Mac there are also some really annoying issues with the dictionary (sometimes it lets me 'learn' a work, other times no option) and grammar checks (completely wrong).

>> I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.

Isn't this the default behaviour in all rich text apps? I think CMD+SHFT+OPTION+V pastes without preserving formatting.

I wouldn't say it's "damn buggy" — I use Notes daily, and have a significant number of notes that are synced between devices. In my notes I use rich formatting, embed videos, voice memos and lots of images. It handles it really well. I even use iCloud Collaboration feature on a few notes for planning, and for splitting regular expenses

I have three notes that exhibit the bug you mention though: the three notes I keep for each of my children's artwork. I scan the artwork using the document scanning tool in Notes, and it gets embedded as a multi-page PDF (if the artwork itself has multiple parts) or a single PDF. After many years of adding high-res scans, when I scroll to the bottom of these files it takes some time for the note to render. I think I picked the wrong tool for the job here, more than anything!

Which is funny because it’s really an incomplete spec that originated from a blog post. But it won anyway because both machines and humans can use it with relative ease, which is apparently quite a difficult thing to achieve in a markup language

> the python library from Microsoft that converts all of their formats to markdown

Thank you for pointing me to the MarkItDown library [1]. I had no idea such a thing existed.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

But which dialect of Markdown?

HTML is. Markdown is a way of writing it that is human friendly. A notes app that can do rich-text to expressive HTML would be even better but it seems like that's not what the market is interested in.

And if you doubt me on that last point, look at things like callouts in Obsidian, clearly people want to be able to do more but we keep tacking weird formatting extensions onto Markdown.

TIL there is a markup language war. Who are the combatants?

nah, if you're talking about math, it's LaTeX

Except of course that almost nobody makes a READER for Markdown. WTF? It's mystifying.

You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with?

After much searching I finally ended up with Marked, on the Mac. A paid app. But that's about it for options. And no, I'm not talking about text editors that offer a "preview" pane that you can optionally invoke. I'm talking about a simple reader for Markdown that renders it, so you're not reading a shitty text file with a bunch of formatting codes in it. Why bother putting them in, if nothing parses and acts on them?