Nowadays I have a feeling that most of the software or apps on laptops and mobiles are too complicated or over-engineered. The apps I am using nowadays have too many features other than their core purpose. I know these apps are made for a wide range of users, and the corporations behind them want their products to be feature-rich and appeal to a larger audience. And they want to make a ton of profit out of it.

But the main challenges of these feature-rich apps are slowness and noise. Apart from taking notes, some note apps have features ranging from calendar to AI. These kinds of features are endless, and they make the app slow and buggy. I am not saying every app is the same, but the more features there are, the more chance there is of noise in the app. I have seen that nowadays these apps are eating too much memory for no reason. They all give priority to new features over optimization.

A while back, when I started using Notion for notes, I felt the same. They added so many features to it, and I don’t want most of them (maybe some of you need them, I’m sorry), and using it makes me tired. So yes, I switched to Obsidian. It’s a great app to take notes, and it does so in an elegant manner, no bloat, and focused on the core purpose.

I want our apps to be optimized; they should be fast and reliable. I don’t want all my apps to do everything. I want my apps to solve the specific problems they were designed to solve. To make the apps more efficient and frictionless, once in a while we need to think about what we need to do to optimize them, which features we need to improve or remove, what the core purpose of the app is, and whether it is serving that purpose in the right manner.

Recently Apple did that in macOS 26 and iOS 26, instead of adding more features, they tried to improve and optimize existing software. That’s a good sign; I wish more companies had the courage to do the same, so that we could have more software that is fast and reliable.