The Slow Death of Simplenote

Simplenote is a fast, lightweight app for taking notes, with just the essentials: basic text editing, syncing across devices, and the option to share notes for collaboration with other Simplenote users. Fred Cheng and Mike Johnston created the first version of Simplenote in 2008. While building the product, they developed a sync engine. This sync engine would become the basis for Simperium, their cross-platform data syncing service. Simplenote became popular because of its straightforward features and it’s core strength: syncing notes among devices. But Simperium core product was their syncing backend. Plain-text editing apps like Notional Velocity/nvALT, ResophNotes, nvPY, and others offered synchronization through Simperium’s API. In 2013, Simperium was acquired Automattic1, the company behind WordPress and other products. At that time, WordPress used XML-RPC for syncing between WordPress sites and the WordPress mobile app, so you could write or edit content for your website on your…