Notability

This was literally the only app I'd purchase an iPad for, it was really good. iPad-justifyingly good.

But that's in the past. Since then it changed its pricing model without making it a new app, meaning existing users were converted to some sort of grandfathered tier which has less features than before and who know have to deal with so much noise from integrated sales and cloud nonsense in the app. Reading through reviews, nobody seems to be asking for this, quite the opposite. It has become one of those apps you can never fully own because there always will be something else to purchase which itself is so shallow they can use its optionality as a scapegoat for it inclusion.

It's very annoying, distracting, busy and just y'know…tacky; I'm pretty sure they know it because they have those long marketing/tips/helpful/it's-really-an-ad/"non-sponsored" blog posts about distractions and zen and all bs-itty problems caused by apps that in astoundingly lack of self-awareness they "fix".

In my experience so far, when a dev/company pulls that move on you, there's no reason to trust they won't do it again.

They backstabbed they customers which they had already been treating like test users in previous versions of the app that were like a long crashy beta, and in my experience, if it (the company) did it once, there's nothing keeping it from doing it again.

BTW, the selling point of subscriptions is that you get a consistent stream of new features, right? Why would you keep paying for the same dev work already done again and again otherwise. Well, since I've had access to pre-, and post-subscription model, I can tell you there's not been a single feature worth paying any upgrade for. It's just bloat— And the built-in Notes app has pretty much closed the gap it had plus it can sync among other backends with Exchange too. BUILT-IN. With this one you can back up to WebDAV and that's it, you need to purchase the desktop version and a public cloud service to sync.