The Notes app: The place on our phones that knows all our thoughts and secrets

A few weeks ago, I dropped my phone. The second it hit the rainy, uneven pavement, I knew I’d pick it up to find a smashed screen reflecting back at me. When I turned it over in my hand, I felt the tell-tale sprinkle of shards of glass – it was immediately obvious that the phone had stopped working entirely. I was frustrated; fixing it was going to be an expensive and boring process. But mostly, I was upset, practically on the verge of tears. My main concern? That my Notes app must be protected at all costs.

For the past decade, the Notes app has been one of my greatest, and most patient, confidants. It has become home to hundreds of secrets, plans and fleeting thoughts that have popped into my head. There’s the speech I’m writing for my best friend’s wedding, years of book/film/TV/restaurant recommendations, and the rules of a card game learnt on holiday in 2014. There are present ideas, cute and hilarious things my little niece has said, future baby names and inscrutable sequences of numbers and letters. There’s a lot of embarrassing stuff in there, too. One entry from 2018 is a list of things I’ll apparently do when I start “Earning Big Dolla”, and the first item on it is: “Buy leg of Spanish smoked ham”. The second, bizarrely, is: “Have bath filled solely with after-sun lotion”.

When I broke my phone, the panic I felt at the prospect of losing my Notes app, which was not backed up anywhere, made me realise just how much I value its contents. And I’m not the only one. When I mention it to a friend, he simply replies: “Apropos of nothing, is it normal to be constantly workshopping the playlist for your own funeral?”

Another friend, Jodie*, whose notes go back to 2013 and contain everything from “existentialism” to “admin”, can also relate. “There are ideas for novels, sentences I think are funny… shopping lists… guest lists for parties I think I’m going to have, links for articles I want to read… and lots of reminders. One just says, ‘Check EDF!!!’”

Heidi*, whose notes only go back about a year but are still very extensive, calls hers “the Wild West”. Among the wifi passwords and random thoughts, she has entries as varied as a list of everyone she’s ever slept with, the lyrics to songs she’s written, and a full plan of what her friend would like for her funeral, “because once we were round her house and she said, ‘I really need someone to know this.’ You name it, it’s on there somewhere.”

While our notes seem to paint a revealing psychological portrait, much of their contents remain an unfathomable mystery. It’s often thanks to a complete lack of organisation: “A lot of my entries are just brain dumps,” says Jodie. “There’s one from June, at 11.11pm, and it just says, ‘Men are walking red flags.’ I’m trying to figure out if I was with a friend who said it and I thought it was funny, or if I’d just been watching Love Island and someone said it on there.”

Heidi reckons she understands about 50 per cent of her notes, “and that’s being generous”. She is intrigued by the many cryptic strings of numbers. “Are they the code to the universe? They might be, who knows.” Once, she found a note that said “call me”, with a phone number next to it. For a whole day, she went around “feeling really pleased” with herself, before she realised it was the number of a carpenter who had offered to do some work on her house. “I’d thought maybe someone had fancied me at the pub!” she says.

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For Jodie, there’s a lot in her Notes that makes her cringe. In 2015, she went through a phase of writing down “quite lofty things” like “human beings as interchangeable ephemera” – “I must have thought it sounded clever?”

But we also write down a lot of notes that make for moving reading. The eulogy I gave at my grandfather’s funeral is in there. I’ve recorded my boyfriend’s sweet quirks and habits that I’ve noticed, the ones I wish I could somehow bottle. And over the years I’ve drafted countless difficult messages to send to an ex or someone I’ve drifted away from – it would be way too risky to write them out in WhatsApp and accidentally press send before they’re ready. (It would seem that celebrities also do this for the important stuff, with everyone from the Dalai Lama to Taylor Swift posting Notes app apologies and statements online.)

The “most precious” entry in Heidi’s Notes is a speech she wrote, off the cuff, for her sister’s 40th birthday. “It doesn’t exist anywhere else,” she says. “And there are drafts of post-breakup messages that are quite moving, because it’s normally me expressing how much that person meant to me.”

When Jodie looked back through her Notes, she realised that since 2015 she has written out practically the same list of ways she wants to improve herself every year: start exercising, eat healthier, go to bed earlier, read at least once a day. “It’s quite poignant to think about how our hopes for ourselves don’t really change – and don’t get fulfilled!”

Eloise Skinner, a psychotherapist and author, says there is “huge diversity in what people include” in their notes, and they are “a reflection of where we are in life, our identity and the things that matter to us”. She says many people also keep a list of negative things about their ex when they’re trying to get over someone, or a pros and cons list when figuring out if they’re going to commit to a new relationship. “The Notes app can feel more informal than getting a piece of paper and writing something down – it might feel too intense to make a physical list of someone’s characteristics like that. But for some reason, our phones do feel like an extension of our personalities. They already carry so much intimate information about us. And because you can make notes password protected, you can write whatever you’re thinking about and know it’s just for you.”

Even if we are just using Notes for convenience, like a digital Post-it, it’s also healthy for us to get our thoughts down in writing. “It’s a form of processing,” Skinner explains, “just like talking to friends or family, or having therapy. For a lot of people, when we don’t feel like we’ve got an outlet, and we’re holding things in our head, it can feel overwhelming and confusing, or intimidating and disorganised. So note-writing helps.”

Heidi says she would “keenly feel the loss” if everything in her Notes app disappeared. “I would really feel it in my heart,” she says, “because as well as the fun, kooky nonsense, there are some quite big things in there – the speech, the songs – that don’t exist anywhere else.” Jodie agrees. “I would feel sad, because it’s like a strange record of my psyche over more than 10 years – a scrapbook that’s really boring and confusing to read but still very personal and detailed.”

As it happens, I did manage to salvage the notes from my broken phone in the end – for a price. And the first thing I did after that was back them up. Since my phone was fixed a few weeks ago, I’ve got nine new Notes entries, ranging from “Code 435” (no idea) to a to-do list that says “Fish, run, tea, package, wine”. Oh, Notes. Please never change.

* Not her real name