You can also syncronize Obsidian with your own hardware/software solution. I've been doing it for years and it's the simplest thing:

- Set up Syncthing to sync your vault folder

- Share with your devices and you're done

If you're already using a VPN and syncing with a home-server, you could also leverage Nextcloud or whatever your current syncing solution is. I don't see any reason to get mad when Obsidian is effectively saying "we don't want your data unless you pay us to handle it right".

Wait I can synchronize with nextcloud just fine. It's just a folder on my drive after all. That said, it's janky on mobile.

That's an understatement. The mobile app is... frankly, kind of a garbage can of usability issues imo, but I love the desktop app, it's pretty great. But until they fix the mobile app I just can't use it.

I'd like to see the mobile app bridge the gap between typical mobile note taking apps and the desktop Obsidian app. Make it easy to create a new note like you would in any other note app, save it where it makes sense to save it, make sync easy to setup, etc. Probably asking too much, but ugh... the mobile app is so bad.

Did you try the 1.0 version of mobile app? It's much improved compared to past versions. What are the issues you are running into?

Just downloaded. Seems a little better. I wish I could easily create a note in whatever folder I am in currently. I have an inbox folder. It’s where new notes go until I can deal with them. This always drove me nuts in both apps, but I can’t just go into a folder. Look at Apple Notes for instance as a simple example of how this works.

The sidebar is just a tree in Obsidian. It doesn’t really act how I want. This is less an issue on desktop, but on mobile my expectations are different.

Hopefully sync setup has improved in mobile. That was awful last I tried it.

> I wish I could easily create a note in whatever folder I am in currently.

That's easy. Go to:

Settings > Files & Links > Default location for new notes: Same folder as current file

Note that the file explorer is a plugin like any other, so you can also create your own file explorer plugin that works the way you want it to :)

Great, I’ll give that a look. Thanks!

I agree that version 1.0 is a huge improvement on mobile, and what convinced me to start using Obsidian. But I also agree that usability on mobile is still not on par with Apple Notes when it comes to navigating folders and searching. The way the desktop UI has been translated to mobile doesn’t work well enough. Would be great if the Obsidian team could spend some time playing with Apple Notes on mobile and see if they are some UI concepts they could imitate :)

While Trilium have a very good web version. It also have cross platform app (Linux, MacOS and Windows) [1]

[1] https://github.com/zadam/trilium/releases/latest

I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source https://logseq.com/.

Any reason not to put the Obsidian folder in git, and sync via push/pull?

There is a plugin that helps automate that as well :) https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git

this is very common

Obsidian is just a folder of plain text files on your computer so you can use pretty much any sync service (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc) — you can even use Git if you want to completely control sync and version control.

Also for web clipper check out this bookmarklet I made: https://stephanango.com/obsidian-web-clipper