Everything That Breaks When You Switch from Keep to Notes

1. Cross platform syncing fails silently with Apple Notes

There’s a weird moment when you add something in Apple Notes on your Mac and look for it on your iPhone five minutes later — and it’s just not there. No error. No spinner. No out-of-date tag. Just… missing. This happened during a meeting where I copied five action items into a note titled “Q2 rollovers” and jumped to mobile to review with a coworker. Empty. Nothing.

The problem is sync in Apple Notes isn’t transactional. It uses iCloud’s background sync scheduler, which appears prioritized for battery life and storage — not real-time parity across devices. Especially if you don’t open the Notes app regularly on each device, updates sit in limbo. I’ve noticed newer devices sync faster, which makes me think this is also related to CPU state and disk availability.

Meanwhile, Google Keep pushes changes aggressively. If I add a bullet point to a Keep note on desktop, I get the ding and vibration on my phone within seconds, even on a flaky connection. And if it fails, you at least get the red bar saying “couldn’t save” — not silence.

Undocumented edge case: Apple Notes won’t push or pull syncs if your device is in Low Power Mode and the Notes app isn’t open in the foreground. I only found this after checking device logs using Console and seeing NotesNetworkingService entries marked as “suspended” under background energy constraints.

2. Labeling and organization behave differently across platforms

Google Keep uses labels. Apple Notes uses folders. That sounds interchangeable until you try to bulk tag or move things. Keep lets you select 12 notes and tag them in one click. In Apple Notes, if you try to move 12 notes into a folder, you get a lag spike, occasionally a crash, and sometimes one or two notes just… stay in the original folder for no reason.

Also: folders can’t be nested in Google Keep, but they can in Apple Notes. However, folders in Apple Notes are scope-based — you can create a subfolder called “2023” under “Projects”, but then you try searching for something in “2023” and the results pull from all notes unless you pre-filter the folder. That extra tap matters when you’ve got 400+ notes and the only clue is someone’s first name.

In older versions of iOS, Notes frequently forgets the last accessed folder once you relaunch the app. This was fixed somewhere between iOS 15 and 16, but I still get reports from colleagues having issues where the UI reroutes them to “All iCloud” upon reopen.

Keep’s label search is its own mess, though. Typing the name of a label in the search bar doesn’t filter notes by label — it shows results that include the word. You have to click the hamburger menu → Labels → Select. Every time. No keyboard shortcut. I once built a Chrome extension just to make this tolerable with command palette-style fuzzy jumps.

3. Handwriting and sketching tools lag or misbehave randomly

I tested two styluses — Apple Pencil and a cheap no-name capacitive one — across both apps. Apple Notes wipes the floor in terms of fluidity. Latency is low, the lines are pressure-responsive, and the lasso tool is actually usable. Google Keep tries, but on anything but a Pixel tablet I get ink trails that float behind the motion of the pen. It’s tolerable until you try erasing. Erase in Keep is weirdly destructive — it wipes entire stroke blocks if you hit even a corner.

“If you undo a drawing stroke in Keep, sometimes it restores the entire previous drawing render, not just the last motion.”

There’s also no shape detection in Keep. Apple Notes will auto-recognize a square and snap it into a perfect square if you hold the pen for a second at the end of the stroke. That’s been ridiculously helpful when sketching UI diagrams during client calls. My Keep equivalent looked like a grade schooler’s maze attempts.

Edge case to watch for: Apple Notes disables pressure sensitivity if you rotate the device in the middle of sketching. I replicated this four times — went from dynamic ink thickness to monotone 1px lines right after the screen orientation shifted. Had to relaunch the app.

4. Voice note capture works radically different between the two

Google Keep has one unique feature I used to rely on constantly: transcribed voice memos. Tap the microphone in the Android app, speak your sentence, and it saves both the audio file and a typed version below it — searchable. Apple Notes doesn’t have this flow at all. You can record a voice memo, sure, but it’s stored as an audio blob, and the transcription is nowhere to be found unless you copy-paste it into Voice Memos → Send to iCloud → Use another app.

Keep’s assistant integration makes it almost frictionless. I had a habit of saying “Hey Google, take a note” when I was mid-walk or carrying groceries. That sent it straight into Keep, tag and all. In iOS, triggering Siri results in one of three things:

• It asks to confirm which app (if you’ve installed third-party note apps)
• It mishears and tries to message someone instead
• It opens Notes and drops you in a new note without saving a title

I stopped trusting Siri for capture because I lost track of several reminders — one ended in me missing a physical letter dropoff for a client that nearly voided a contract clause. I now just dictate into Drafts and forward later.

Discovery I didn’t expect: if you use the Google Keep widget on Android and hit the Record button, you get less delay between voice and transcript vs. doing the same through the Assistant. The widget shortcut uses a different flow. Log level traces show it accesses microphone data via JobScheduler context instead of a serialized Assistant Intent.

5. Collaboration flow confuses new users inside Apple Notes

Multiple people editing a Google Keep note works exactly like Google Docs — cursors, colors, near-real-time. With Apple Notes, sharing a note is clunky. You can invite people, but not everyone knows they need iCloud turned on for it to work. One person I work with had Notes accidentally linked to Gmail-only mode, which blocks sharing completely and gives… no error. Just disables the option without warning.

Best part? If you try to open a shared Apple Note from the wrong Apple ID (like if you’re signed in on Safari with work and Notes is personal), you’ll get a blank note. Again, no error. I only figured this out after watching someone open the same link in Chrome and Safari and get different results due to different iCloud states.

Keep won me over here by sheer reliability. I once shared a note with four people across devices — one on an old Galaxy Tab, one on iOS, one in Chrome on PC, one in Firefox on Linux — and it still updated perfectly as we each added checklist items. The only issue was occasional duplication if someone copied the entire list instead of appending, but that’s human, not tech.

When Apple Notes sharing does work, edits appear with a slight delay but are clean. You can swipe left to see recent changes, sort of. But again — no notification, no cursor positions, no way to see who typed what unless you memorize your teammates’ verbs.

6. Search behavior feels smart in Keep but brittle in Apple Notes

If you type a keyword into Google Keep, it’ll match titles, body text, transcriptions, labels, and even text inside images. It’s surprisingly good. I searched “whiteboard October” and it pulled up a photo of a scribbled quarterly plan that I’d never tagged. OCR is working overtime there.

Apple Notes search flips between helpful and broken. On iPad, it tends to prioritize exact keyword matches. I searched “invoice” and it missed four notes that included “invoicing” in the body. It only pops those up if you type the root with a wildcard (invoic*), which no average user will try.

I ran a few side-by-side tests. Searching “Q2”:

• Keep surfaced five notes, including one with a scanned image containing a printed “Q2”.
• Apple Notes returned two: one in the title, one in the first line. Missed body mentions entirely.

A bug I’m still watching: Apple Notes sometimes drops results entirely if your query includes both a number and a hyphen. Searching “2023-Q2” yields nothing unless you enclose it in quotes. But on the iPhone version, quoted text shows fewer results. I’ve sent feedback but no acknowledgment yet.

Small win — if you tag notes with hashtags in Apple Notes (e.g. #client), those are filterable from the Tags browser, even if you forget the casing. That helps. But you have to remember they exist — they don’t autosuggest.