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We're not trying to hit some deadline, we're just putting the apps out when they're ready, and an iOS is ready now."Īhead of the launch, I chatted with Small over Zoom as he sat in front of an Evernote-branded virtual background and told me what life has been like inside the company as it has worked to rebuild itself. Why iOS first? "Oh, because the app is ready. New apps for Windows, Mac, Android and the web will follow "in the coming weeks," Small said. Now, 18 months later, Evernote's launching a new iOS app that has the same name and look as the old Evernote, but is otherwise almost entirely new. Small originally thought it might take a year, maybe a little more. The note editor, the apps, the search, the cloud infrastructure, everything had to change. They would stop building new features and new products for as long as it took to fix the core of Evernote from the ground up in a way that would work better going forward. So not long after he started, he told his team that rebuilding Evernote was now their only job. Small felt the progress on this core stuff was slow and not sweeping enough. Shipped something like an overhaul of the service, along with a few new features and big ideas about the future.īut the brand-new Evernote still had too many of the old Evernote's issues.

"The only question was, what do we do about it?" In 2017, then-CEO Chris O'Neill moved Evernote's data to Google Cloud and started the process of unifying the codebase. "I think anyone could have told you that, looking from the outside in," Small said. While other apps were becoming faster, more useful and more powerful, Evernote was slowly becoming a crufty, complex relic of a once-great app.Įvernote's been aware of this problem for a long time. Internally, Evernote employees called the app's codebase "the monolith," and that monolith had grown so big and complex, it was preventing the company from shipping cross-platform features or doing much of anything in a short time. (Even after years of problems, it still has more than 250 million users.) Evernote had five different apps run by five different teams for five different platforms, and each had its own set of features, design touches and technical issues. When Small joined Evernote in late 2018, the problem had eclipsed the room at the once-highly-regarded and still-hugely-popular company. And eventually, the problem gets bigger than the room that you're in." "And to have momentum, you need to keep shipping things, and to keep shipping things, you need to keep pushing problems sometimes into the corner and look the other way. "Silicon Valley is addicted to momentum," Evernote CEO Ian Small said, by way of explaining how his company had come to be, as he put it, stuck.