Information is expanding at an exponential rate, yet the tools we use to capture it remain stubbornly linear. The note-taking space has stagnated with applications that are essentially digital typewriters - skeuomorphic holdovers that force our non-linear thoughts into documents, pages, and folders.
We’ve been building mobile productivity apps since 2015, and honestly, we never thought we’d make a note-taking app. There are already a ton of them out there. But after years of trying different options for our own personal use, we kept hitting the same wall.
So why then? I was working on a side project and needed to pull together ideas from articles I’d saved, random thoughts I’d jotted down, and some code snippets. It was a mess. I was jumping between apps, copying and pasting, and still losing track of stuff. I thought, “Why can’t I just grab this paragraph, that code block, and those bullet points and put them exactly where I need them?”
The problem wasn’t that we needed a better note-taking app. We needed something fundamentally different - a way to work with pieces of information, not just pages of text.
So we built Unit - a personal note-taking app that works the way your brain does.
Unit is built on a fundamentally different paradigm than Evernote, Bear, or Apple Notes. While they digitize the notebook, Unit componentizes information into manipulable blocks that can be:
For example, when I’m working on a personal project, I can extract specific quotes from articles I’ve read, drag them into my project notes, and arrange them however makes sense for my thinking process - all with intuitive touch gestures that feel natural.
As a native iOS application built from the ground up with Swift and a custom block-based data model, Unit delivers computational advantages that web-based or legacy note systems simply cannot match:
We built Unit because after years of developing productivity tools, we encountered the same limitation repeatedly: note-taking apps were ignoring the unique capabilities of iOS and touch interfaces while clinging to document paradigms designed for desktop word processors.
The concept came when we stopped thinking about notes as documents and started thinking about them as composable blocks of information - each with its own properties, capabilities, and relationships.
The result is not just another notes app. It’s an adaptive system that grows with your personal knowledge and projects without forcing you to change how you naturally think.
Unit represents our vision for what happens when information management is completely rethought for the capabilities of modern devices and the complexity of modern work.
We’re launching with an initial set of block types - text, lists, images, to-dos, web bookmarks.
Early access begins next month for iOS, with a waitlist open now at unit.app.
The age of the digital typewriter is ending. Welcome to modular information management.
