Review Insights · App Store
Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft Corporation · 1,048,083 ratings · ★ 4.7
4.7
★★★★★
1,048,083 ratings
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Top complaints - extracted from 33 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"notes"
14 negative reviews mention this · 42% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Annoying typing delay. Overall, the OneNote for iPad is a solid notetaking app except for one very, very important thing,…… note taking. This app is afflicted with severe output delay when you type. It occurs whether you are off or online. It makes the applic…" - ebizexec
2
"onenote"
7 negative reviews mention this · 21% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Annoying typing delay. Overall, the OneNote for iPad is a solid notetaking app except for one very, very important thing,…… note taking. This app is afflicted with severe output delay when you type. It occurs whether you are off or online. It makes the applic…" - ebizexec
3
"note"
6 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Annoying typing delay. Overall, the OneNote for iPad is a solid notetaking app except for one very, very important thing,…… note taking. This app is afflicted with severe output delay when you type. It occurs whether you are off or online. It makes the applic…" - ebizexec
4
"ipad"
5 negative reviews mention this · 15% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Annoying typing delay. Overall, the OneNote for iPad is a solid notetaking app except for one very, very important thing,…… note taking. This app is afflicted with severe output delay when you type. It occurs whether you are off or online. It makes the applic…" - ebizexec
5
"iphone"
5 negative reviews mention this · 15% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Awful launch, sign-in, authentication experience. I have to sign-in EVERY TIME I send an email to OneNote, from Outlook, which is the same account. And all. Too often, it fails after making me enter my credentials and wait for it to respond. Idiotic. Insultingly so. And now I’ve just been …" - phukiu
6
"update"
5 negative reviews mention this · 15% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Keeps corrupting data. Switching to Google drives notes. I was once a believer in one note, but since the update it has corrupted my notebook data twice costing me 8 or more hours of study time to try and save my data. Very unhappy with the new product." - Lexi.s123
7
"doesn"
5 negative reviews mention this · 15% of all complaints
★★★★★ "No sync. It doesn’t sync with the onenote on my desktop" - dascovagama
8
"taking"
4 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Annoying typing delay. Overall, the OneNote for iPad is a solid notetaking app except for one very, very important thing,…… note taking. This app is afflicted with severe output delay when you type. It occurs whether you are off or online. It makes the applic…" - ebizexec
9
"every"
4 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Awful launch, sign-in, authentication experience. I have to sign-in EVERY TIME I send an email to OneNote, from Outlook, which is the same account. And all. Too often, it fails after making me enter my credentials and wait for it to respond. Idiotic. Insultingly so. And now I’ve just been …" - phukiu
10
"notebook"
4 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Awful launch, sign-in, authentication experience. I have to sign-in EVERY TIME I send an email to OneNote, from Outlook, which is the same account. And all. Too often, it fails after making me enter my credentials and wait for it to respond. Idiotic. Insultingly so. And now I’ve just been …" - phukiu
11
"work"
4 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Awful launch, sign-in, authentication experience. I have to sign-in EVERY TIME I send an email to OneNote, from Outlook, which is the same account. And all. Too often, it fails after making me enter my credentials and wait for it to respond. Idiotic. Insultingly so. And now I’ve just been …" - phukiu
12
"keeps"
4 negative reviews mention this · 12% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Keeps corrupting data. Switching to Google drives notes. I was once a believer in one note, but since the update it has corrupted my notebook data twice costing me 8 or more hours of study time to try and save my data. Very unhappy with the new product." - Lexi.s123
📋 All 33 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
Keeps corrupting data
Switching to Google drives notes. I was once a believer in one note, but since the update it has corrupted my notebook data twice costing me 8 or more hours of study time to try and save my data. Very unhappy with the new product.
No sync
It doesn’t sync with the onenote on my desktop
Keeps crashing while typing notes
Since the last major update, OneNote crashes every few minutes while I an authoring notes.
Not easy to use
You can’t even alphabetize notes, really?
Let me use it first
Can’t use app because this survey pops up every 10 seconds
New Phone
I recently went to a new phone but my notes did not transfer. I can not find a good place to be able to fix that.
Doesn’t work
I cannot create a new notebook with this app on iPhone or iPad no matter what I do I cannot interact with a new notebook creation area to create a new notebook. Looks like there’s more bugs to squash here.
Bugs
They big you a lot for reviews
Never worked
It doesn’t work. I downloaded it. Opened it and kept getting error messages. Waste of time.
Personal & business accounts & computer v iPad dont synch
Always have issues a OneNote
App is really laggy
Unable to use app as it is so laggy on iPhone 17 pro max.
Hard to use
When it works it works great but they’ve made it so difficult to just want to take some good note and sync them to use across platforms. The whole one drive system needs to be better
更新更个寂寞
工具栏还是挡着最后几条笔记，你就不能最后一条笔记下面留出一段空白吗？？？？？这样也可以保持最新一条笔记在视野中央
This is way too complicated
No way for me to understand this!
Wtf
The app sometimes tweaks and doesn’t allow me to write with my Apple Pencil or upload files like the button I’m trying to click isn’t working
IOS update
Still unable to send sms text messages to Android phones
No search feature
No search feature unless you want to pay for a subscription. Also, just difficult to manage on the iPhone. It becomes read-only, etc. hard to organize, too.
Worst note taking app
Hardest app to use for taking notes. Would strongly recommend finding another app.
By Now It Should Be Better
Electronic notes are not new. Microsoft is a fabulously wealthy corporation. It is shocking how elementary and bad this program is.
The functions that record cursive work well. In fact, I have enjoyed taking notes in cursive and embedding pictures and webpages as record what is happening.
But Microsoft hasn’t spent any time making it easy to combine notes pages into PDFs, for example. I have to export each page individually and then email them to my work account so I can combine them into an Adobe. This is pathetic.
The cursive to text part of the application is absolutely abominable. There’s nothing intuitive about it and it is filled with bugs that are just maddening. If the internal teams at Microsoft haven’t fixed it yet, I would suggest they hire a few teenagers, one to test and the others tp program to get it right. Start from the beginning, reduce all the ridiculous complexity, and just focus on the basics.
But will Microsoft listen? Probably not.
The functions that record cursive work well. In fact, I have enjoyed taking notes in cursive and embedding pictures and webpages as record what is happening.
But Microsoft hasn’t spent any time making it easy to combine notes pages into PDFs, for example. I have to export each page individually and then email them to my work account so I can combine them into an Adobe. This is pathetic.
The cursive to text part of the application is absolutely abominable. There’s nothing intuitive about it and it is filled with bugs that are just maddening. If the internal teams at Microsoft haven’t fixed it yet, I would suggest they hire a few teenagers, one to test and the others tp program to get it right. Start from the beginning, reduce all the ridiculous complexity, and just focus on the basics.
But will Microsoft listen? Probably not.
Experiencing 7+ bugs consistently
Unfortunately a worse experience than the default Notes app, it’s much more reliable than OneNote. I’m not surprised as microslop probably had copilot take over as project lead. Thank God I’m not locked into the ms stack
New update is totally stupid and adds so much junk that no one will use..
New update adds so much useless junk. I am thinking of using a new note app it is so terrible. The persistent menu in the bottom right corner is huge and cluttering and stupid……… (old review) Bug: seems that upon opening notes, often it goes to “draw” feature and you scribble instead of scrolling.. Could easily be 5 stars if this was fixed and there was a feature added to search within a note…. Such a simple and great note tool that is missing… Also, i can’t believe you can’t update name of notebooks on the app…
Synch is broken
Every time I try to add notes to my notebooks a copy of the he notebook is spawned. According to OneNote on my iPad I have 5 notebooks with the same name, and according to OneNote on Windows I have something called an “open object” that has hits when I’m searching for items within the 5x iPad notebooks.
Update May 2026: somehow it’s worse.
Update May 2026: somehow it’s worse.
Annoying typing delay
Overall, the OneNote for iPad is a solid notetaking app except for one very, very important thing,…… note taking.
This app is afflicted with severe output delay when you type. It occurs whether you are off or online.
It makes the applications largely unusable. I have started to open the iPadOS Notes app to take live notes and transfer them over by cut-n-paste. Far from optimal.
Fix this very basic problem, Microsoft!
This app is afflicted with severe output delay when you type. It occurs whether you are off or online.
It makes the applications largely unusable. I have started to open the iPadOS Notes app to take live notes and transfer them over by cut-n-paste. Far from optimal.
Fix this very basic problem, Microsoft!
Awful launch, sign-in, authentication experience
I have to sign-in EVERY TIME I send an email to OneNote, from Outlook, which is the same account. And all. Too often, it fails after making me enter my credentials and wait for it to respond. Idiotic. Insultingly so. And now I’ve just been informed that my notes on iPhone haven’t been syncing to the cloud for perhaps as long as the last 3 weeks?!? So now I gotta manually comb through every single notebook and manually email each page to myself as a pdf and then manually insert those into the appropriate place in OneNote on my PC (assuming that’s working properly?!?! This might be enough for me to finally abandon all hope that OneNote will ever work properly on iPhone. What a ridiculous, unworkable app!
Love the organization BUT
Would love my sticky notes to be its own app that more accessible for everyday use. Other than the iPhone notes app
Glitchy
It’s a great idea but has issues.
乱码
安卓显示正常，iOS文字显示乱码
汉字显示的一个问号加一个方框。
汉字显示的一个问号加一个方框。
Confusing
Not as good as the competition. Confusing. Overly complicated. Constant password prompts like ever app in the paranoid world of MS. No support whatsoever
It keeps crashing and lagging
The maintenance gets worse since 2023. This needs to get fixed asap. It’s slow and crashes
Difficult to use
It’s not very friendly to use when you create notes and it hides them and you have to go manually open the notes. I find it very difficult to delete a note as well when you’re done with it.
Account isolation is unclear
It’s not clear if having an enterprise account and personal account in this app exposes all of my personal content to the company. Trying to log out of the enterprise account doesn’t seem to prevent the app from re-adding it, so i feel the app may not be able to isolate my content
This is getting annoying and ridiculous
I mean.. the app keep lagging for me even though I restarted my iPad Air (M4). This situation keeps on happening whenever I was in class as the professor teaching or whenever I was taking notes at home.
Sentiment summary
94%
Positive (4-5★)
3%
Neutral (3★)
4%
Negative (1-2★)