No warnings found Nothing found in 501 reviews, the store listing and the privacy label. We check costs, ads, pressure and tracking, not everything.
From our automated analysis, 26 Oct 2026.
This analysis describes version 3.0.3 of the app, analyzed 2026-10-26 .
The store currently lists version 3.0.3, updated 2026-10-22.
Store screenshots supplied by the developer.
Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown app to capture, write, and organize your life.
Take notes, plan your day, journal thoughts, organize tables, create lists and tasks, sketch ideas, link notes together, write a book, and much more. Bear is used by writers, lawyers, chefs, CEOs, teachers, doctors, engineers, students, parents.. you get the picture. Getting started couldn’t be faster—no signup and no account. Just open a note and write naturally.
"My journaling app of choice is Bear" - Kit Eaton, New York Times
* 2017 Apple Design Award
* 2016 App Store App of the Year
* Editors' choice for 7 consecutive years
* Most of our parents love it
## BEAUTIFUL. SIMPLE. POWERFUL. PRIVATE…
From the developer’s store description.
For developers and the curious
The evidence, sources, measurements and versions behind every label above.
Open observations that have not cleared the evidence bar.
Reviewers report clear pricing: raised by 6 distinct reviewers (about 1 in 84 reviews we read)
This observation has not cleared the required evidence standard.
The app's own text offers a one-time or lifetime purchase, or reviewers report that the price is stated clearly.
The store privacy disclosure (1 entry) links no contact details or identifiers to the user — consistent with an app that does not require an account. Self-reported by the developer.
This observation has not cleared the required evidence standard.
The app's own screens offer a way past sign-up — guest access, skipping, or browsing before registering — rather than gating the product behind an account. The store's privacy disclosure is checked alongside it: that disclosure is self-reported, so it corroborates this credit rather than establishing it.
Nothing was published as a thing to watch for in this assessment. That is not a finding that nothing is wrong with the app.
501 reviews read for this analysis. Each observation keeps the sample and store it was based on.
Great Note app for light formatting — I don’t like the iOS Notes app much. I wanted a text editor with light formatting options, like WordPad in Windows. Bear is perfect for this. You can apply bold, italic, underline, strike-through or…
Honest review — This app has nice features, but it doesn’t beat Apple Notes, which is free. For specific needs, I already use Microsoft Word and Apple Pages. So I’ve got more than enough apps that cover everything Bear does, and more. The…
Lifetime Purchase — Need lifetime purchase IMMEDIATELY
A sampled review illustrates one person’s experience. It does not establish a finding on its own.
“Not assessed” means we could not measure it. It is never a zero and never a pass.
No package has been scanned for this app, so nothing is published about what it ships. That is an absence of evidence, not a finding.
Supporting measurements: not a complete list of possible harms or positives. Measurement vocabulary 1.4 · how these are measured
This analysis describes version 3.0.3 of the app, analyzed 2026-10-26 .
The store currently lists version 3.0.3, updated 2026-10-22.
Each store’s release notes, as the developer wrote them. They are the developer’s words, not ours.
New: A new toolbar now appears when you’re entering tags or wikilinks, or searching for notes. It makes it easier to move the cursor and type special characters. Bug fixes and stability improvements.
- Bear is now ready for iPhone Duo! - Fresh new design for panels - Improved automatic sizing for tables - Better handling of custom keyboards in edge cases - Fixed an issue with context menus
- Fixed an issue where Bear backups could cause problems with encrypted notes - Fixed a bug affecting the /add-text action - Fixed several note search issues affecting Bear's CLI and other extensions - Fixed an issue where Markdown files weren't importing correctly - Fixed keyboard suggestions not working as expected
Appworthy
bear-markdown-notes-and-journalAssessed 2026-10-26 from 501 user reviews, the store listing and its privacy label. We have not scanned the app's package, so nothing on this page was read from inside the app itself.
What the stores publish. Store ratings are the stores’ numbers, not Appworthy’s, and are never averaged across stores.
From the store listing. Billing terms are read from each purchase’s name — the stores don’t publish them — so treat them as a strong hint, not a disclosure.
This assessment is produced automatically. Three independent signals are read — user reviews, the store listing and the store privacy disclosure — and each candidate finding is filed under the sources that support it.
No charge stands on one kind of evidence — with one published exception. A finding is either a measured fact that anyone can reproduce (an ad SDK is in the package; every subscription bills weekly; the privacy label omits a tracker we can see), or it is an interpretation — and an interpretation needs independent sources to agree before it reaches the catch list. The exception is a harm only users can see: a charge may publish from reviews alone, as “Reported by N users”, once enough reviewers raise it to clear that charge’s own published bar. That agreement rule is what replaced the human reviewer, not a model’s confidence.
There is no overall score, on purpose. A 0–99 number was published here until 2026-09-15. It was withdrawn because it discriminated too weakly to be the instrument — 44.7% of every pair of apps tied — and because a single number is a verdict where a count is an observation. What publishes instead is a row of measurements, each of which says what was counted and, where we could not look, says that instead.
Findings under One source only are real reports we do not stand behind as findings. They are shown because withholding them entirely would hide a genuine complaint, and labelled because publishing them as charges would be an accusation off a single source.
Write to [email protected], or use the form. Name the finding, the app version and the evidence that needs correcting. Factual corrections are free and never depend on buying anything.