What it is
SmartNotesSort is a notes app for people whose problem is not capture — it's everything that comes after capture. It listens to a voice memo, reads a screenshot, accepts a share-sheet drop, and quietly does the work most people give up on: deciding which of those things is a task, which is a calendar event, which is a passing thought, and which one actually matters today.
It is not another inbox you have to triage. It is the thing that triages for you, on your phone, without your data going anywhere.
Who it's for
SmartNotesSort was built primarily for people with ADHD and executive-dysfunction patterns — the people who capture everything in a panic and retrieve almost nothing — and it works just as well for anyone whose Notes app has grown into a graveyard they can't bring themselves to read.
- You voice-memo a thought at 11pm and never find it again.
- You screenshot a flight confirmation and lose it among 400 others.
- You write "dentist Tuesday" in Notes and miss the appointment.
- You have eight half-started lists and can't tell which one is the real one.
If any of those sentences feel personal, this is the app.
Capture is everywhere
The app gets out of the way of the moment of capture. You do not decide what category your thought belongs to — you just get it out of your head:
- Voice. One tap from anywhere, talk for as long as you want.
- Photo or screenshot. Snap it; the app reads what's in the picture.
- Type. The plain old text field, when you're at a keyboard.
- Share sheet. Pull anything from any other app — a tweet, a webpage, a screenshot — into SmartNotesSort with one tap.
- Siri. "Hey Siri, capture a note" — works hands-free.
What the AI does for you
Capture is just the first step. What makes SmartNotesSort different is what happens after — and you don't have to ask for any of it.
- Sorts it for you. "Dentist Tuesday, buy milk" becomes a task with a date and a shopping list item — no manual tagging.
- Tells you what's urgent. Each item is ranked by deadline, importance, and emotional intensity. The high-urgency ones break through Focus mode.
- Catches duplicates before you save. Already wrote down "call mom" this week? It tells you, kindly.
- Resurfaces relevant past notes. Working on something? It quietly pulls up the old note you forgot you had.
- Suggests projects. Notices when several captures are about the same thing and offers to group them.
- Suggests archives. Stale notes you haven't touched in weeks get gently flagged for review.
- Reads the emotional tone. Anxious, overwhelmed, excited — flagged so you can see the shape of your own week.
- Connects related notes. A visual graph shows how your thoughts link up over time, so you can see patterns you didn't know were there.
How it gets back to you
- "What should I do now?" card. One question, one answer — the highest-leverage item right now, given the time of day and what's on deck.
- Lock-screen widget. Your top three urgent items are always one glance away. Tap to capture instantly.
- Weekly cleanup. Each week, a single card asking "these eleven items have been sitting — archive them?"
- Flashcards from your notes. Anything worth remembering becomes a spaced-repetition card automatically, so you actually retain what you wrote down.
- Relation graph. A visual map of how your notes connect — useful when you're thinking about something and forgot what else you've said about it.
The privacy story, in one paragraph
Your data never leaves this iPhone. Every category, every urgency score, every duplicate check happens locally. The app works in airplane mode. Face ID re-locks it after a few minutes in the background. Sensitive screens don't show up in screenshots. There is a single "clear everything" button that means it. The footer of every AI-generated card reads "Generated on-device, never uploaded."
Why we built it
Most notes apps are built for an idealized user — one who triages their inbox, follows up consistently, and reviews weekly. That user is rare. The rest of us capture frantically and retrieve almost nothing. SmartNotesSort starts from the assumption that the capture is the easy part, and the rest is what an app should do for you — quietly, on the device, without asking you to keep a system.
It is also a deliberate counter-position to the cloud-first notes apps. Your scattered thoughts are some of the most sensitive data you produce. The case for keeping them on the device is the same as the case for keeping a journal in a drawer instead of in someone else's filing cabinet.