He's right: Markdown was built for web editing in an era where physical keyboards outnumbered virtual ones. It doesn't really make sense for Notes outside of export.
There's little benefit to it as an input system on iOS/iPadOS (likely the dominant platforms for Notes) where formatting menus are just as close as `#` and `_` characters.
Several Markdown rules wouldn't make sense in the context of Notes. e.g. "end a line with two or more spaces then press return to create a <br>", which was designed to accommodate manually hard-wrapped text that Notes users likely don't want. Apple would have to follow something like CommonMark (feels unlikely) or implement their own Apple-flavoured Markdown, leaving you to learn what's supported and discover the quirks — kind of like its partial implementation of vim input in Xcode.
Popular Markdown apps seem to have converged on 'edit on line focus, preview on line blur', which is surely what the Notes app would do, because modal editing with preview and edit modes feels un-Appleish. 'Preview on line blur' _is_ nicer than a separate preview mode if you're a Markdown power user, but it still leaves many quirks you have to learn. (Just today I wrote, '# Thoughts on C#' in Obsidian, which reads ok with the cursor on that line until I pressed enter and the preview became, 'Thoughts on C'. Leaving me to learn I was supposed to know to write '#Thoughts on C\#' in the edit mode.)
Keyboard-accessibility isn't the only advantage of formatting characters. The most frustrating, throw-my-device-at-the-wall issue with 90% of WYSIWYG text editors, is the insane handling of invisible input states.
- If you begin writing a bold word, but want to delete the first character, the style is reset.
- If you’re writing a list and you want to exit out of it, every editor has a different weird convention of doing that.
- I can’t even begin to describe the amount of broken behavior that is entering code in MS Teams (does Microsoft use Slack internally?)
There are some innovative ideas to solve this, like Bike [^1], but nobody goes to the effort of implementing them. So the easiest, most compatible and most intuitive solution are formatting characters like in Markdown.
I use markdown all the time on iOS with Notion. It functions as a shortcut for formatting operations like creating headings and bullets.
Do iOS devices still default to translating consecutive spaces into “. “ within a few seconds? Always used to be a bother when authoring md content on an iPad.
That can be disabled [0] (and I feel like has been on option for many years now).