I have been using notebooksapp (notebooksapp dot com) For nearly 20 years, when I first had an iPod Touch, before having an iPhone or iPad. This has been my primary notebook. I paid for it without any subscription fees (through the years, I have bought upgrades many times, though most upgrades have been free).
I have a 15GB and growing vault that lives in Dropbox and has always synced with no problems. There is no cost for this sync, as it does not require any third party service other than Dropbox, and the apps handle the sync. I also access this via emacs to manage org-mode files, and the beorg app on iOS for the same files.
I have been able to Obsidan on the same vault on the desktop, which has added some features for me (base, kanban, graph view, etc).
Claude Code has added even more functionality to the vault.
Having Obsidian on iOS is a nice-to-have, but not a have-to-have desire at the moment. There are two issues:
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To sync a 15-20GB vault is $16-20 per month - ouch!, but its doable.
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Since I already sync the vault via notebooksapp, that means I have double the files and storage requirement on the iOS/iPad devices.
I will probably forget about using Obsidian on iOS/iPad because of these issues, but here is the pipe dream:
The vault I sync in notebooks app is accessible via the iOS/iPad file app.
THE QUESTION:
Why can Obsidian not just use that vault from there? No alternate sync necessary. I would be willing to pay for Obsidian in some other way than a $20 sync I don’t need.
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