How Evernote became a great productivity app again

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For many years, the Evernote elephant was a truly iconic logo. Evernote was one of the first productivity apps to support smartphones, allow cross-platform syncing, and make saving and creating almost anything really easy. And that's how Evernote became huge.

But Evernote's peak was about a decade ago now. Since then, the product has often felt stagnant (or worse), the company has lost executives and business plans, and it seemed like Evernote was slowly turning into a zombie app. Not gone, not even forgotten, just kind of… there.

When Bending Spoons acquired the company in 2022 and laid off nearly all of its staff soon after, millions of Evernote users were confused about what the future held for the tool they'd relied on for so long. Things got even worse when the company went virtually silent for months. But since then, the story and pace around Evernote has changed pretty dramatically. In 2024 in particular, Evernote released a long list of new features, revamped its design, added some fundamental new features, and made the app feel modern again. With all of these changes came a change in pricing—and not everyone is thrilled.

In this episode of The Vergecastthe third and final part of our series on productivity and digital living, we catch up with Federico Simionato, the Evernote Product Lead at Bending Spoons. We talk about the acquisition process, how he perceives Evernote in today's environment, what it took to start shipping new content again, why Bending Spoons changed the subscription price, and more.

We also talk about the future of Evernote and productivity tools in general. Evernote is more than two decades old, so it's full of old ideas about what people want and how they want to use it. Simionato and his team are tasked with figuring out how AI fits into Evernote, how the product will integrate with all the other tools that already exist, and turning Evernote into something that works for the old users and appeals to new ones.

If you're interested in learning more about the topics we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

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