What's the Use Case for a Mobile PKM App?

I was asked this question in the Athens Research Discord channel when I was asking if they had plans for mobile.

I thought I knew the answer, but as I thought about it more I realized I may not fully know.

Increased Complexity

At first I thought to myself, "Well, I would want mobile to be the same as desktop. All the same functionality."

But is that super reasonable to expect? For something like Evernote or Bear it is reasonable. Those are writing apps with some complexity, but not too much. They are fairly straightforward.

But new PKM apps are becoming increasingly more complex with what you can accomplish using them. We are far past the days of just adding a tag or throwing notes in folders. Now we have bi-directional linking with backlinks, advanced queries, graph views, charts, tables, block references, spaced repetition, etc.

It's like jumping from iMovie to Final Cut Pro.

Most people are fine with iMovie, but more and more people are needing Final Cut Pro.

And here's the thing: iMovie has been on the iPhone for a while and it's pretty much the same as the desktop experience, but Final Cut Pro still isn't on the iPad or iPhone. Final Cut Pro is a lot more complex and has more moving parts. It takes time to move all the features over to mobile.

Ok, I took that analogy a little deep, but I think it works.

So how do you take something complex and shrink it down to a mobile device? What features do you bring?

Pareto Principle

When Apple made the iPhone they knew they wanted OSX, but they couldn't just port it over to mobile with no major changes. That would be a disaster. They had to rethink  how to do things on a smaller screen with a less precise input method (your finger). What does a web browser look like on a smaller screen? What does Finder look like on mobile with a walled garden OS? You need larger touchpoints. You need a better scrolling methods. Etc.

It took time and they still haven't given the iPad and iPhone full feature parity with the Mac, but most people are fine with that because the experience that they DO have right now is great and provides them with 99% of the funcionality they need.

So if we were to take an outliner app like Roam (insert Logseq or Athens Research if you want) and turn it mobile, what features would you want? Can we just port everything over?

I think we need to apply the Pareto Principle to this situation and find what that 20% of features are that provide you with 80% of the functionality.

I think it comes down to 2 main features:

• Quick Capture

• Quick Search

When it comes to my "second brain" what I want to be able to do on-the-go is to add things to it quickly and to be able to search it quickly.

Quick Capture

Roam actually has a great system for this. They have a webapp for quick capture. It's basically just the Roam site when you view it on mobile. The first thing it gives you is a quick capture webapp. You can install that to your phone by adding it to the home screen and whenever you have a thought, just pull it up, add in your thoughts and then sync it whenever you want. It's actually really nice.

This is also what I love about Drafts. It's an app that launches to a fresh note ready for you to type. It eliminates all friction to writing down your quick thought.

So if you had a mobile app of a PKM a great feature would be to allow some sort of quick launch to a blank slate to start writing. When you are done, it could prompt you to select where you want to save it. IFTTT had an app a while back that was super similar to this idea called Do Note.

You could launch the app to a blank slate, write whatever you wanted, and then send it off anywhere you wanted using your IFTTT recipes. It was actually a brilliant idea.

I would love more PKM apps to adopt this strategy for mobile.

Mobile is about smaller, shorter, experiences so things have to be fast. Having a quick method for capturing is a must have for a mobile PKM.

Quick Search

One of the major use cases for a mobile PKM is just being able to search your "second brain" while on the go.

This is something that has come up many times. I was mentioning something from a book I read and was wanting to tell it to someome verbatim and was trying to pull up my notes in Roam on my phone, but it was a little slow. The webapp is pretty darn good, but nothing beats a native experience.

MyMind is one of the best search experiences to show this off. MyMind is all about capturing things and then resurfacing them when you want. It's not a full note-taking app, but it's one of the best apps ever for throwing images, websites, small thoughts, memes, tweets, videos, whatever and then searching it later.

Here's a use case. I follow a bunch of random meme accounts on Instagram and when I find something funny that really made me laugh, I throw it in MyMind and tag it as "make me laugh". MyMind does some AI tags as well, but I like to use my own specific tags for easy recall. The time from launching the mobile app and searching for that tag is about 3 seconds.

For my second brain, I want to be able to search it quickly. I want to Google Search my graph and I want it to be quick.

Mobile App Design

Here's a quick sketch I did to imagine what a minimal app like this might look like.

The app would launch and the keyboard immediately come up allowing you to start typing out whatever thought you had. There's a search at the top that is always easily viewable. You can lower the keyboard to see a link that would take you to your full graph with all your notes and this could even be in read-only mode.

There are going to be some people that will want full functionality on the mobile app. That's not a crazy request, but I'm fine if it takes time to get there as long as you give me search and input to start out.

Speed

Yes, the rest of my notes could be in read only mode too. I'm fine with that. I do my heavy lifting on my computer. As long as I have access to my notes quickly. If it isn't quick to view, then don't bother. I want speed on mobile.

But I would want the app to be native. Being native allows it to launch immediately. There is absolutely no comparing Craft to the Obsidian app or the Roam webapp. Craft destroys them because it's native. And since you wouldn't be trying to copy the full functionality of the desktop experience, it hopefully would make it easier to build. Native always beats non-native in terms of speed. Non-native certainly makes it easier to build once and deploy in many places.

Mobile as the Best Input Method

Mobile is one of the greatest input methods of all. Imagine being able to connect the PKM to Apple Health and have it pull in your weight or step count every day and add it to your graph? What if it could pull in your photos in the background? What if it could pull in any song you Shazammed? Take a photo of a book in the bookstore and immediately share it to your PKM app and it throws it into your daily notes.

On the iPhone you have a plethora of apps to connect to and pull in to your graph. I would love to see a PKM app take full advatage of that. You can really only do that with a native app.

Conclusion

There is definitely a good case to be made about having a mobile PKM app that has great input methods and great search. No one is really doing this right now except for MyMind and it's not so much a note-taking app.

I would love to see a PKM app company experiment with a mobile app that was mainly used for capturing content from your phone and allowing you to search through that content. If you could build that app that connected with all parts of your phone, it could buy you a LOT of time to eventually build out full functionality into the mobile app. You could bring in each part one at a time and before you knew it, you had a full featured mobile app. Your iMovie app turned into Final Cut Pro, but it's designed for mobile.

Thanks for listening to my ramblings on this subject!