At Automattic, we have a saying:
We don’t make software for free, we make it for freedom
In this spirit, we are announcing today that all of the official Simplenote client apps are now Open Source Software under the GPLv2 license. In addition to the previously open sourced Electron app, you’ll now find the source code for the iOS, Android, and macOS applications on our GitHub page.
We love using Simplenote at Automattic and hope that we can build a great community of contributors from around the world to help make the apps even better.
You can download the source for the apps here:
- iOS: https://github.com/automattic/simplenote-ios
- Android: https://github.com/automattic/simplenote-android
- macOS: https://github.com/automattic/simplenote-macos
- Windows/Linux (Electron): https://github.com/automattic/simplenote-electron
Happy noting!
– The Simplenote Team
Simplenote 
This is great news… sadly overshadowed by the lack of any iOS/macOS release. I really wish we had a new release, then an open source announcement. It would be better to have feature consistency across platforms first. The wait would have been worth it.
An iOS update is on the way that adds Markdown support.
Thanks, Dan. How about markdown for macOS?
No markdown for macOS yet, but we’re considering releasing the electron app for macOS as well, which would include markdown support.
This is great, bravo folks. I’d like to ask if you can provide RPM builds and a repository for simplenote as well for RHEL/CentOS or Fedora.
Does your saying come from a rapper, by Chance? 😉
Very cool. But yeah, would love to see an iOS update.
Yes inspired by Chance. 🙂
Nice catch 🙂
Some feedback from a new user on Windows
1. Would be nice if the menu bar followed the theme. See Spotify for example. I’d like to use the Dark theme but there’s a big disconnect between the application itself and the menu bar.
2. I can’t get markdown to work on the version I downloaded a few minutes ago. Writing:
#test
**Hello hello**
and then switching between Edit and Preview doesn’t change anything.
3. Is there really a need for markdown to be an option in preferences? I feel like it would make more sense if there was an always-on/off switch in preferences and the Info-panel could be used to turn it on/off for individual notes. A hotkey would also be nice.
Hi! Thanks for the feedback.
1. We are using Electron for the Windows and Linux apps which adds a native menu bar around the React web app. Electron may add support for a dark menu bar in the future, though.
2. Try a space between `# test`
3. We are actually changing it up, see: https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-electron/issues/259
So when do we get a self hosted Simplenote? Pretty please?
The server is a lot more complex to open source, and also much more difficult to run, than the clients, but it’ll happen someday.
Glad this is in the roadmap 🙂
As someone that runs a theology/volunteerism blog and would only consider himself in the n00b category as far as tech knowledge goes it is still awesome to see the development of Open Source.
It amazes me that we even have things like Open Office and the like.
There are a lot of incredibly gracious people out there with absolutely amazing talents. That they choose to take the time to share those I think speaks a lot to the tech communities altruism.
I mean that’s really only the beginning of how much good a lot of people in this community bring forth.
Great post and great to see all this stuff moving forward :)!
Cheers!
When will we see the server component open up? Open source clients are all well and good, but the value of the Simplenote platform is in the data hosting.
No ETA on that but it is something we’d like to do.
Great to hear!
Here’s hoping we this means we can potentially run our own sync server now. 🙂
Here’s another vote for working toward opening up our own servers.
Here’s a question: Will you support Apple Pencil?