The journey of River Notes

the short version

The journey started mid-2024, and River has been live since 2025. Chipping away, a little at a time.

2024

May

• Exploring ways to store hundreds upon hundreds of daily notes

August

• Trialling advanced customisation of apps

November

• First sketches of the architecture for a new app

2025

April

• Building structure, storage, sync

June

• “hello world”
• River Notes is online

July

• Search added
• Calendar

August

• Backups and export

December

• First imports — Google Keep and Markdown

2026

February

• Add images into the page

March

• Share a note via link

June

• Voice scraps have arrived

what we have checked

• 31 August 2026 — restored an off-site backup into a throwaway
• The notes came back, including images and audio
• 21 August 2026 — about a week of database backups
• Those backups do not include media files
• 10 August 2026 — lost access on purpose, got back in
• Notes still readable on a clean browser