Galaxy Tab with the pen, and every recommendation thread I find is about the iPad. I need to write by hand in meetings, find things again six months later by searching for a word I wrote, and get everything out in a format that is not locked to one company. Tried three apps so far and each one was strong at exactly one of those three things.
On Samsung hardware the built-in Notes app is genuinely the strongest option for the writing and searching half of your list, because the handwriting recognition and search are baked in and it finds my handwritten words most of the time — worse with anything that looks like a diagram label, fine with sentences. Where it falls down is exactly your third requirement: getting out cleanly. Exports are PDF or image if you want it to look right, and the native format is not something another app will open. I keep it and export the small number of notes that matter into text every few months.
The recognition quality also depends enormously on how tidy you are. My handwriting is bad and search finds maybe half of what I want, which is fine for browsing and useless as an index.
Worth doing the export test before you commit rather than after two years of notes. Write ten pages, export them all, and see what you actually get out.
Nebo is the one I ended up paying for, specifically because the recognition is the best I have used and it converts a page to typed text in one gesture, then exports to Word, HTML or markdown. That solves your search and portability problems at once, because you are not searching handwriting, you are searching text. What it is not is a good place to keep a thousand notes — the organisation is weak compared with a real notes app. I write in it and file the converted text elsewhere.
OneNote is the boring answer and it works well on Android with a pen, syncs everywhere, and searches ink for me reasonably well. The catch is that you are in one company's ecosystem forever and the export options have never been good. If your workplace already runs on it, that objection is mostly theoretical.
The combination that has survived three years: handwrite in whatever app feels best on the hardware, convert to text the same day, and keep the text in plain markdown files that sync themselves. The pen app becomes disposable, which is the entire point — you stop caring whether it is still around in five years. It costs you a couple of minutes per page and buys you the only thing on your list that actually matters long term.
Treating the pen app as disposable is a reframe I needed. I have been trying to find the one app that does everything and there evidently isn't one.
Going to disagree with the handwriting-search enthusiasm generally. I have tested it across several apps and for my writing it is somewhere between good and useless depending on the day, and an index you cannot trust is worse than no index because you conclude a note does not exist. If finding things in six months is genuinely your priority, type the important parts. Handwrite for thinking, type for keeping.
@question_jar · 4mo ago
Whatever you choose, check what happens when you cancel. That is the only feature that matters in year three.
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