Obsidian's mobile app is its biggest weakness

The desktop app is powerful. The mobile app feels like an afterthought. If you capture ideas on your phone, this matters more than any other feature.

Obsidian's desktop app is where the product shines: fast, customisable, powerful. The mobile app is where it struggles. The interface that works beautifully on a large screen with a keyboard feels cramped and clunky on a phone. Image handling is frustrating: images don't paste cleanly, attachments need manual management, and the attachment folder can become a mess. Navigation through a vault with hundreds of files on a small screen is slow and unintuitive. The mobile experience feels like the desktop app compressed into a phone rather than reimagined for how people use phones.

This matters because mobile is where capture happens. The idea on your commute. The photo of the whiteboard. The voice memo after a meeting. The quick note before you forget. The screenshot of something you want to reference later. If the mobile app makes capture slow, frustrating, or unreliable, the captures don't happen, and the notes you would have taken go unrecorded.

The gap between Obsidian's desktop and mobile experience is large enough that many users describe using a different app for mobile capture (Apple Notes, Drafts, voice memos) and then manually transferring to Obsidian later. This two-step capture process adds friction, which means some captures never make it to the vault at all.

What mobile-first capture looks like

Fabric was designed for mobile from the start. The mobile app handles multiple capture types, each optimised for how people actually use their phones:

Voice memos: Record a thought, and the app transcribes it automatically. The transcription is searchable. No typing on a small screen required.

Quick capture: A fast note input that takes seconds. Type a thought, save it, move on. It's in the library and searchable immediately.

Screenshot sync: Screenshots from your phone sync automatically into the library. The visual inspiration you captured is searchable alongside your text notes.

Web clipper: Save articles from your mobile browser with one tap. The full content is saved and indexed, not just the URL.

Photos: Capture a whiteboard, a document, or anything visual. It's in the library and findable.

Everything captured on mobile is searchable by meaning on desktop within seconds. The sync is reliable across every device. No manual transfer step. No separate capture app. No friction that prevents the capture from happening.

Frequently asked questions

Is Obsidian's mobile app really that bad? It's functional but not designed for mobile workflows. Text editing works. The frustrations are around image handling, navigation in large vaults, plugin compatibility (not all desktop plugins work on mobile), and the general feeling that the interface was designed for desktop and adapted for mobile.

Can I use Obsidian on desktop and Fabric on mobile? Yes. Some users use Obsidian for deep writing on desktop and Fabric for mobile capture and search. The tools serve different strengths.

Does Fabric's mobile app work on both iOS and Android? Yes. The mobile app is available on both platforms with feature parity.

What about Obsidian Sync? Obsidian Sync ($8/month) works but syncs the vault as files, which means the sync speed depends on vault size. Large vaults with many attachments can take time to sync. Fabric's sync is content-level rather than file-level, which is typically faster.

Can I use voice memos in Obsidian? Obsidian can record audio, but there's no built-in transcription. The audio file sits in your vault as an audio file that you can play but not search. Fabric's voice memos are automatically transcribed and the transcription is searchable by meaning.

What about tablet (iPad) use? Obsidian's iPad app is better than the phone app due to the larger screen, but it still lacks some desktop features. Fabric's tablet experience mirrors the desktop experience with touch optimisation.

How important is mobile capture really? If you regularly have ideas, encounters, or observations outside of your desk, mobile capture is essential. The notes you don't take because the tool is frustrating on mobile are lost permanently. The quality of the mobile experience directly determines how complete your knowledge library becomes.

Does Fabric's mobile search work the same as desktop? Yes. The same semantic search powers both platforms. A search on your phone returns the same results as the same search on your desktop.

Related reading: Obsidian is not for everyone, The plugin problem, Obsidian setup takes forever. Related pages: Mobile app, Fabric vs Obsidian, AI voice notes.