The End of Quotebook

In 2011, as three students in a dorm room, we released the first version of Quotebook. Since then, tens of thousands of you have used it to keep track of important quotations in your life.

We’ve recently started receiving an increasing number of complaints from customers that the iCloud syncing features have been working less reliably. We’ve poured thousands of hours into developing, testing, and retesting these features over the years as Apple has released new operating system versions and APIs that have broken our implementation. With the upcoming release of iOS 10, Apple has signaled they will be removing support for iCloud Core Data. This is the foundational technology upon which Quotebook’s storage and syncing is built.

Unfortunately, no matter how much time and energy we’ve spent, we’ve been unable to consistently deliver the quality and reliability that we expect of our products due to fundamental problems with Apple’s APIs. Quotebook has always been a passion project of ours, but its sales simply cannot justify the time we’d need to continue to support it going forward or to migrate to another data storage system.

Today, we are removing the app from the App Store. If you’ve ever purchased Quotebook, you’ll still be able to download it from the App Store’s “Purchased” screen for the foreseeable future. We’re as heartbroken about this removal as we’re sure some of you will be. We’ll be using the additional time and energy to build even better products and focus more on our current and future apps.

If you’ve got data in Quotebook and you’d like to export it for use in another application or system:

1. Open Quotebook
2. Tap the settings gear in the top left
3. Tap Backup & Restore
4. Tap Export CSV
5. Choose Email

Your CSV will contain the quotes, authors, sources, tags, dates, and ratings that you’ve collected in the app, and you can import it into a database like Airtable. If you need to export custom author and source descriptions, instead use the “Back Up” button and email the file to yourself. On a Mac, you can open this file in Xcode or PlistEdit Pro, and on Windows in PlistPad to extract the data. If you run into trouble with this process, email us at [email protected].

Thank you so much for being a customer, supporter, and friend of Quotebook. We’re really sorry that we cannot continue to develop the app, and we’ve learned a lot from this experience. If you’re interested in speaking with us about taking over development of the app, email [email protected].

“The problem with books is that they end.”  –Caroline Kepnes