WorkFlowy: Note, List, Outline 4+

Workflowy has become a safety net for everything I care about. It’s the one place I can find exactly what I’m looking for and the first place I send new valuable information. As a writer, it helps me research, structure, create and improve documents, and keep everything organised by topic, client, or however I wish. I can also keep my Christmas shopping under control and track plans for pet sitting too. It’s so simple to use, has unlimited scope and fits around my life like a glove.

This app really deserves to be better. It’s fine if you want to view your WorkFlowy content that you’ve created with the full version, but it’s weak when it comes to authoring.

The most glaring omission is that there’s no way to share something (text, links) from other apps into WorkFlowy. It supports sharing text out of WorkFlowy, so this feels like a weird oversight.

Shortcuts support would be *fantastic* for an app like WorkFlowy, but there’s nothing.

It does support links at least, so if you write your WorkFlowy content on the desktop version you can include cross-links between nodes and they work. They even work from within other iOS apps, so you can click a link in Reminders (for instance) and it will jump you to the correct node in the WorkFlowy app. What you cannot do in the app, AFAIK, is copy the link to the current node. This feels like a major oversight given how WorkFlowy embraces cross-linking in general. You *can* share the current node and get a link that way, but doing so makes the node public, which is unnecessary and possibly undesirable.

It *does* work well in pop-over on an iPad as well as in split screen… however it doesn’t support having two WorkFlowy windows side by side. The inability to open more than one window is also a failing of the desktop apps, but that’s hardly an excuse. The web version supports multiple windows/tabs just fine.

WorkFlowy deserves a better iOS (and MacOS…) app than this.

The experience on iPad in particular is just such a shame. As others have said, the desktop app is great, but mobile adaptation seems to always fall so far behind. We get the latest features sure, but the basic user experience is still poor. For instance at the moment it gets confused between me wanting to edit a bullet and move a bullet, and it’s still, after all these years, incredibly difficult and frustrating to tell what level in the hierarchy you are placing your bullet. It just isn’t good I’m sorry to say! I just have to work around it. But it’s not a pleasant experience. And it’s definitely not going to encourage new users to join up.