Octopus Notes

The Octopus Studios

About this app

Octopus Notes is a fast, featherweight notes app (about 10 MB), written entirely in Kotlin. It turns your phone or tablet into a digital notebook for handwritten notes, sketching, PDF annotation and infinite whiteboarding, and it keeps everything private on your device. No account. No ads. No tracking. Works fully offline.

Write naturally Write with a finger or stylus using Pen, Pencil, Brush and Highlighter. Strokes are smoothed, pressure-sensitive and saved as vector ink that stays razor sharp at any zoom. Scribble over ink to erase it, hold a stroke to snap it into a perfect shape, and pin one end of a line or arrow while you aim the other, watching the real-world length in mm/cm before you lift. Tools remember your sizes and colors, and adjust automatically to the page you're writing on.

Two canvases Notebook pages with ruled, grid, dotted, blank or your own photo templates (fine-tune line density, brightness and thickness, in portrait or landscape, at any page size), plus an Infinite Whiteboard with an unbounded canvas for brainstorming, mind maps and free sketching. Add pages continuously as you write, or manage pages with thumbnails, bookmarks and reordering.

Annotate PDFs Open any PDF from your device or straight from another app, write directly on the pages, search the text, navigate the outline, inspect links and properties, then export as PDF, PNG or a ZIP of PNGs, with your ink staying vector-sharp in the export.

Stay organized Nest notes in folders, tag them with colors (macOS-Finder style), star favorites, search across everything, sort by name or date, and switch between grid and list views. A Bin keeps deleted notes and folders recoverable until you empty it, and multi-select moves or deletes whole groups in one go.

Rich tools Drop in resizable text, draw tables and type inside cells (merge, insert and resize rows and columns), insert photos from the gallery or camera with a full crop-and-rotate screen, pull images from the built-in web browser, draw perfect shapes, lines and arrows, measure distances with the on-page ruler, present with a glowing laser pointer, and decorate pages with translucent washi tape. Everything you create is undoable, duplicatable, selectable and recolorable, even after saving.

Made for styluses Deep support for the S Pen plus beta support for Xiaomi, Huawei and other pens: double-tap the button to switch tools, slide to change size, hover gestures, and long-press to erase. Every gesture is configurable, with separate finger and stylus behavior.

Built to be fast Notebooks open instantly and dense pages stay smooth while you scroll, zoom and edit. The app is a single, lean APK that runs great on modest hardware, and your library renders live thumbnails so you can spot a note at a glance.

Your notes, your way Material You theming, dark mode, and translations in nine languages. Browser-style tabs for open notes with pinned and recently closed tabs, plus full keyboard shortcuts. Customize which tools appear in each toolbar: notebooks and the whiteboard can keep separate sets.

Backup & restore Mirror your notes, PDFs and images into any folder you choose (Obsidian-style) in human-readable files after every edit, and restore everything (notebooks, folders, tags, favorites, templates and settings) on a new device. Your notes stay yours: the app is free, open source (AGPL-3.0), and your data lives only where you put it.

Octopus Notes grows with its users, and every release is shaped by real feedback. Join the community at https://www.reddit.com/r/octopusnotes/ to share your setups, request features, report bugs and help decide what Octopus Notes becomes next.

What’s new

Check Changelog in app.