Bear

Bear was launched in 2016 by Shiny Frog, a small Italian indie development studio. The app filled a gap between overpowered apps like Notion and basic apps like Apple Notes — a native, beautifully designed writing app that handled both quick notes and long-form prose, with Markdown support and a clean tagging system. Bear became an immediate hit in the Apple design community, winning an Apple Design Award in 2017. The app is free with a Bear Pro subscription ($2.99/month or $29.99/year) that unlocks export, themes, and sync. Shiny Frog kept the team small, focused obsessively on typography and design quality, and expanded from iPhone to iPad to Mac. A massive v2.0 update in 2023 rewrote the engine with much faster sync and new features, reigniting growth. Bear has hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers and consistently ranks as one of the most-used note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem among creatives and writers. Pure indie success built on craft.