Obsidian on iPhone used to feel like a punishment. The app worked, technically, in the way that a manual hand pump works - you could get water out of it, but you’d resent every stroke. Slow to open, awkward to navigate with one thumb, and plugin sync that required either a paid Obsidian Sync subscription or a Frankenstein setup involving iCloud and crossed fingers.

The 2025 mobile overhaul changed almost all of that.

What Actually Improved

Launch time is the first thing you notice. On an iPhone 15 Pro, Obsidian now opens to your last note in under two seconds from a cold start - previously it was closer to four or five, which sounds minor until you’re trying to capture a thought before it evaporates. The editor has also been rebuilt to feel native rather than ported. Swipe gestures work correctly. The keyboard toolbar has been reorganised so that the formatting options you actually use - bold, internal link, checklist - aren’t buried behind a scroll.

The canvas feature, which lets you arrange notes spatially on an infinite board, now works on mobile without inducing despair. It won’t replace a desktop session for serious diagramming, but it’s usable for reviewing a project’s structure while you’re away from your desk.

The Sync Situation

Obsidian Sync, at $10/month (or $8 on an annual plan), remains the cleanest path to cross-device reliability. It’s not cheap for a notes app. But the iCloud workaround - storing your vault in iCloud Drive and opening it on both platforms - is noticeably more stable than it was eighteen months ago. I’ve been running this setup for three months without a conflict or corruption event, which wasn’t previously something I could say.

Why Notion Should Pay Attention

Notion’s mobile app has always been optimised for consumption and light editing. Its actual writing experience on iOS is mediocre - block-based structure that stutters, databases that feel clumsy on a small screen. Obsidian was never a real threat on mobile because it was worse. That excuse is gone now.

Obsidian is still plaintext Markdown in local files. That’s not for everyone. But for anyone who writes seriously and has been tolerating Notion because Obsidian’s mobile experience was too painful, the calculus has shifted. The desktop app was already the best focused writing environment in its category. The gap between desktop and mobile no longer feels embarrassing.

It took years longer than it should have. But the app is good now, and that matters.