For so many years, the Evernote elephant was a truly iconic logo. Evernote was one of the first productivity apps to embrace smartphones, to enable cross-platform sync, and to make it really easy to store and create almost anything. And so Evernote was huge.

But Peak Evernote was roughly a decade ago. Since then, the product has often felt stagnant (or worse), the company churned through executives and business plans, and it seemed like Evernote was slowly turning into a zombie app. Not gone, not even forgotten, just sort of... there.

In 2022, when Bending Spoons acquired the company and soon after laid off nearly all its staff, millions of Evernote users were confused about what the future held for the tool they had relied on for so long. Things got even worse when the company went essentially silent for months. But since then, the narrative and pace around Evernote has shifted pretty dramatically. In 2024 in particular, Evernote has shipped a laundry list of new features, retooled its design, added some core new functionality, and made the app begin to feel modern again. With all that change has come a shift in price, too — and not everyone’s thrilled.

On this episode of The Vergecast, the third and final installment in our series about productivity and digital life, we sit down with Federico Simionato, the Evernote product lead at Bending Spoons. We talk about the acquisition process, how he perceives Evernote in today’s landscape, what it took to start shipping new stuff again, why Bending Spoons changed the subscription price, and much more.

We also talk about the future of Evernote, and productivity tools in general. Evernote is more than two decades old, and is as such filled with old ideas about what people want and how they want to use it. Simionato and his team are tasked with figuring out how AI fits into Evernote, how the product should integrate with all the other tools that now exist, and turning Evernote into something that works for the old users and appeals to new ones.

If you want to know more about the things we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

• Federico Simionato on X
• From 2016: Evernote’s new CEO on the company’s critics: ‘I love to be underestimated’
• From Jason Kincaid: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant
• From 2022: Evernote’s getting acquired by mobile developer Bending Spoons
• From 2023: Evernote has laid off most of its US staff and will move most operations to Europe
• Our other Work Smarter episodes: A Googler’s guide to getting things done and What’s in a productivity system?