Google Play / productivity / COLORNOTE NOTEPAD NOTES
REVIEW
ColorNote is the sticky-note app Android never quite outgrew.
Fifteen years old, 100M+ installs, and a 4.88 average across 258,000 reviews. The Android notes-app that refuses to evolve into something it isn't.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
ColorNote Notepad Notes
NOTES
OUR SCORE
8.1
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.9
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
ColorNote has been on Google Play since 2010. In a category that has cycled through Evernote’s collapse, Google Keep’s quiet dominance, Notion’s mobile-rebuild saga, and Obsidian’s plain-text revival, ColorNote has done essentially nothing. The data model is two note types. The visual language is colored sticky notes. The killer feature is a home-screen widget that has not meaningfully changed in a decade. And it has 100 million installs and a 4.88 average across 258,000 reviews — a rating that almost no app in the productivity category sustains at that scale.
The lesson is one most app developers don’t want to learn: there is enormous, durable demand for a notes app that does one thing fast and asks nothing of you. No account, no onboarding, no AI assistant, no subscription. You install it, you tap a colored square, you type a grocery list, and you put a sticky-note widget on your home screen. That’s the entire product surface. ColorNote’s competitors keep adding features; ColorNote keeps not.
The honest review acknowledges where this model breaks. Sync is manual and assumes a single device. Format is text-only — no images, no Markdown, no attachments. Power users outgrow it. But for the dominant use case — quick capture, shopping lists, passcode hints, phone numbers — nothing on Android is faster, and the 4.88 rating reflects fifteen years of people quietly noticing that.
ColorNote is a sticky note that opens in a quarter-second, lives on your home screen, and does not ask you to sign in.
FEATURES
ColorNote is two note types and a widget. Text notes and checklist notes — that's the data model. Each note gets one of nine background colors (the namesake), an optional reminder with calendar attachment, and a position on a home-screen sticky-note widget that mimics a Post-it. The 4×4 grid widget displays the note body directly on the home screen without opening the app.
Organization is shallow on purpose. Notes can be tagged, sorted by color, archived, or pinned. There are no notebooks, no nested folders, no rich text, no Markdown rendering, no attachments, no images inside notes. The search is full-text and instant. Password lock works per-note or app-wide.
Backup is the unusual part. Notes back up to either Google Drive (the developer's account-less option) or a local SD-card file. There is no first-party cloud sync between devices — the Drive backup is a manual restore, not live sync. The app is free, ad-supported with a one-time IAP to remove ads, and runs on Android 4.4 and up.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Speed is the whole product. ColorNote opens to your note list faster than Google Keep cold-starts; new-note-to-typing latency is a fraction of a second. On a budget Android phone from 2019, ColorNote is one of the few notes apps that still feels native — because it essentially is, a thin Java/Kotlin app over SQLite with no web stack underneath.
The sticky-note widget is the feature people stay for. A shopping list, a phone number, a passcode hint sits visibly on the home screen and updates in place when you check items off. Keep's widget can do this; Samsung Notes' widget can do this; neither feels as light. And the design hasn't drifted — a 2026 install looks essentially identical to a 2014 install, which is rare praise.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Sync is the structural gap. ColorNote's "backup" model assumes you use one device and occasionally restore. There is no live cross-device sync the way Google Keep, Samsung Notes, or any modern notes app handles it. Power users on multiple Android devices end up exporting, importing, and resolving conflicts manually. For a notes app in 2026 this is a real limitation, and the reason power users tend to drift to Keep or Obsidian eventually.
The other ceiling is format. No images, no Markdown, no rich text, no attachments. Checklists are flat — no nesting, no sub-tasks. If your notes are anything other than short text or shopping lists, you outgrow ColorNote within a week. That's by design, not oversight, but it does cap the audience.
CONCLUSION
Install ColorNote if you want a sticky note that opens instantly, lives on your home screen, and never asks you to sign in. The 4.88 rating across a quarter-million reviews is earned — this is one of the most consistently good single-purpose apps on Google Play. Skip it if you need multi-device sync, images in notes, or anything beyond plain text. The next thing to watch is whether the developer ever ships real cross-device sync; fifteen years in, the bet seems to be that they won't, and that's fine.