Why I took sync out of a notes app

I live on Amami Oshima, an island about 380 km south of the Japanese mainland. I run a small company here — we film the island from the air, we run a café bar, and we build websites and apps for local clinics, hotels and associations. MEMOROLL is the first app we put on the App Store worldwide. It is a notes app, and it does not sync.

That last part was not the plan. Sync had always been on my list when I chose a notes app. The note lived somewhere in the cloud, and being able to see and edit the same thing on my phone, my tablet and my computer was exactly what I called "convenient".

What changed my mind was building this app. To design it, I had to step back and look, honestly, at how I actually used a notes app. Almost everything I wanted to keep came to me away from a desk — on a break at work, walking along the shore, waiting for the food I had just ordered. The device in my hand was always the phone. The tablet and the computer were where I read things back, sometimes, and even that was becoming rare. The phone was not one window among several. It was the notebook.

Once I saw that, sync stopped looking like a feature and started looking like a cost. To sync, a note has to leave the phone and live on someone's server — mine, in this case. That means an account, a login, a password reset flow, a database I have to protect, a terms-of-service page, and a quiet promise to the user that a company they have never met will look after their unfinished thoughts. I did not want to make that promise. I did not think I could keep it better than their own phone could.

So I asked a different question. Not "how do I sync?" but "who should hold this?" The answer was obvious: the person who wrote it.

What MEMOROLL does instead

When you open the app, the cursor is already in the input box. There is no title to invent and no folder to choose. You write, you save.

The reason for that speed is simple, and anyone who has tried to write down an idea knows it. Between the moment something comes to you and the moment your fingers reach the text field, the idea fades. A title to type, a folder to pick, a screen that takes a second to load — each one costs a little of it, and sometimes all of it. I wanted the distance between a thought and the written words to be as close to nothing as a phone allows. Every design decision in the app is downstream of that: if it adds a step before writing, it does not go in.

The note records the time and, if you allow it, the place. Later you can look back at your notes in a timeline, by day, in a calendar, on a map, or by searching the text.

Everything is stored in a database on the phone. There is no account and no server. The app has no analytics and no ads, and there are no third-party SDKs in it.

That would be fragile if it ended there. Phones get lost. So each time you write, the app copies your notes and photos into your own iCloud Drive, in a folder called MEMOROLL. The copy belongs to you; I never see it. When you move to a new phone, you restore from that folder. You can also export everything as a ZIP file at any time and keep it wherever you like. The way out is always open.

There is one small decision I am fond of. The day changes at 4 a.m., not midnight, so a note written at one in the morning stays with the day it belongs to. It is the kind of thing you only get right by using the app yourself for a while.

What I gave up

I gave up the multi-device story. If you want to type long entries on a keyboard and read them on a tablet, MEMOROLL is not for you, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend.

I also gave up the ability to know anything about how the app is used. There are no numbers coming back to me. What I have instead are the people around me on the island who installed it in the first days and told me, directly, what confused them. One of them said the save button was hard to recognize — it was a floppy-disk icon, which means nothing to a lot of people now. The fix, a plain "Save" label and a short hint on the first screen, went into review the next day. That is the feedback loop I want: a person, a sentence, a change.

A feed with one member

At first glance, MEMOROLL looks just like a social app. Notes scroll as a timeline, with a time, a place and a photo, and it moves the way a feed moves — quickly, without loading screens, without waiting for anything. That is deliberate. Ten years of social apps have taught everyone's thumbs how a timeline should feel, and I saw no reason to throw that away.

What I left out is everyone else. There is no follow button, no likes, no comments, no one to post for. The feed has exactly one member, and it is you. The pleasure of scrolling back through a day loses nothing without followers. If anything it gains something: the feeling of swimming naked on a beach that no one else can reach.

What it becomes

I called it a notes app because that is what it is. But something happens when a notes app keeps time and place without asking, and when you know that nothing you write leaves your hand. You write smaller things. Where you had lunch. What the sea looked like. A sentence you do not want to lose. After a few weeks, the timeline is not a list of notes any more; it is a record of your days, in your own words, on your own device.

I have a motto I try to live by: do not repeat your days. For a long time I have kept it in mind: do something today that I did not do yesterday. Then, while testing MEMOROLL on my own phone, I noticed something. When you capture moments one by one, each with its time and its place, and then scroll back through them, the days you had filed away as "the same as always" turn out not to have been the same at all. The light on the harbor was different. The person you ran into was different. The sentence that came to you at lunch had never come before. The days had not been repeating. I had been pushing the small changes to the edge of my attention. The app does not tell you to change anything. It simply keeps the moments, and lets you see that your days were never a repetition after all. And once you know that, you start to hold each moment a little more carefully — not to make the day special, but so as not to miss the ways in which it already is.

No account. No social network. No synchronization. Just your memories — and your memories stay yours.

One day. One person. One story.

MEMOROLL is free on the App Store, in Japanese and English. It was made by one developer on Amami Oshima, Japan. — https://resdev.jp/en/app/memoroll/