Automattic ends Simplenote active development, only basic maintenance continues
Automattic has formally confirmed that active development for Simplenote, its established note-taking application, has ended. According to a recent announcement on the service’s forum, the company clarified that no new features or enhancements are planned. Instead, only basic functionality will be maintained going forward.
While maintenance continues to keep Simplenote operational, the pace of updates has already been slow for several years, with only minor changes released by Automattic in that period. As a result, most users should not see noticeable differences in the short term, provided the service remains available.
Given the shift in development, users seeking alternatives can turn to a range of similar applications. Options such as Obsidian and Logseq support advanced note organization and knowledge bases. Joplin is recommended for managing notes alongside tasks. For those with a focus on privacy, Standard Notes and Notesnook both offer end-to-end encryption. Users interested in further alternatives can find additional options within the note-taking category.
- Note-taking Tool
- Free
- Open Source
External links
- Simplenote is no longer in active developmentSimplenote • Official source
- Simplenote’s Quiet Death: How Automattic’s Cost-Cutting Left Millions of Users Scrambling for a New Notes AppWebProNews
- Simplenote is no longer in active developmentHacker News
Comments
Simplenote has always basically been a giant tech demo for the paid simperium service but they never made it its own business so I am not surprised. I also never saw a reason to use it over something like standard notes.
I moved away from Simplenote a while ago, but only because I wanted to self-host as much of my cloud apps as I could, and Nextcloud Notes did almost everything I wanted. Otherwise it was a great alternative to Google Keep & iCloud Notes, and I'm kind of torn between sad that it's not being developed anymore and, well, it is simple - it doesn't really need more development outside of bug fixing. I guess the real question is how long Automattic will keep the sync service running, and there doesn't seem to be any indication of that in the real announcement. I guess they haven't turned it off in the last 6 months, at least!
The linked WebProNews article doesn't seem to match the forum announcement or archives, the Hacker News discussion, or a year's worth of search results at Reddit or Hacker News. It's all about the reaction to a full service shutdown coming up in...July 2025...with only 30 days' notice...but dated today. With quotes from the forums about the short notice. I'm guessing someone saw the "no more development" discussion on Hacker News and directed an LLM to write an article and it hallucinated the rest based on some other service that was shut down with only 30 days' notice.