"Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it."

As someone who enjoys note-taking in Obsidian (by far my favorite super-powered markdown editor), I respectfully disagree with the premise and conclusion. On the contrary, IME, MD isn't single-purpose, and it absolutely can and does serve as a first-rate format for note-taking.

I'm not trying to take Obsidian away from you...but I'm also not trying to sign my Grandma up for Obsidian :D

There’s https://alto.so/ that does exactly what you want.

I take my notes in INI format with a lose schema, as I accumulate data I tend to move towards something more concrete and write tools for it. I think this is the absolute best compromise between some kind of formal personal ERP-like (PRP?) system and something super loose like Markdown or org mode.

Of course doing this on an iPhone is an absolute nightmare because everything has to be blessed by Apple and you can't just do one-off ad-hoc automations or usefully compose tooling that touches the filesystem. Everything has to be canned and sharecropped (at best) so them adding Markdown to the only text editor that supports fast, energy efficient background sync is a huge deal.

When I had an iPhone I did try doing some server-side automation with the SGML-like (can't remember if it was actual HTML or not) format notes used. Like most of those sorts of things it was a miserable uphill fight to get value out of the thing. I've been so happy ever since I've completely given up on anything smartphone related.

Did you ever test drive the Drafts app? It is remarkably easy to build customized workflows, both editing and document processing, and is built to be glue between different document/message apps.

It's a little late for that now since I don't own a smartphone anymore but it looks like there isn't a Linux version so the usefulness to me would have been limited anyway.

I like my Markdown notes editor, but I agree it's not the right choice for Apple notes because exposing the underlying machinery in everyday use is not Apple's style.

It’s also not handy to reach the mark-up characters from a touch keyboard. And if you are adding backticks and asterisks to a markup bar, you might as well just add bold and italics to the markup bar.

This varies a bit by touch keyboard. The standard iPhone keyboard is particularly bad at this while the AOSP and Google keyboards on Android aren't so bad.

Joplin, the notes app I've been using lately does have a markup bar with those features.

It does feel like a good option for export though (as John says in the post).

I think you want Alto / Montaigne (spelling?). They’re both made by the same person IIRC.

Also https://quotion.co/ for Notes to blog.

That was my dream once upon a time. I put my blood, sweat, and tears into making it happen. Check out my indie product: https://quotion.co