Sometimes it feels like the most cursed tech combination you can have these days is a Windows PC and an iPhone.

Apple is known for their great ecosystem, but they keep it as closed as possible. I don’t blame them, but it makes a lot of things harder for someone like me.

An issue I came across recently was when I wanted to export all my notes from the Apple Notes app into my Obsidian vault.

I could not find a single tool or service that could help me achieve this. The only way was seemingly to buy a Mac where the option to export notes was available.

I couldn’t accept this, I had to find a way.

And now … good news!

I have found a way to reliably export all notes from your Apple Notes app to any Windows machine of your choosing … no Mac needed!

Requirements

You will need:

1. Access to the Apple Shortcuts app
2. A Dropbox account (a free account is more than enough, use my referral link and gain an extra 500MB of space if you want!)

Note: All of my notes in the Apple Notes app were text based, I haven’t tested how it would work with attachments, or if it would work at all.

The Process

Install Dropbox on your Windows PC and set up a local folder where your synchronised files will be placed.

Then head to your iOS/iPadOS device and open the Apple Shortcuts app.

You will need to make a shortcut as below:

specific details below

In summary, this shortcut works by:

1. Finding every note in your Apple Notes app (you can add optional filters here if you like)
2. For each note it finds, the shortcut will:
   • Get the created date of the note
   • Format the created date in a succinct, nice-looking way (yyyy-MM-dd @ HH.mm.ss)
   • Save the note to a Dropbox folder of your choosing with the filename being the date of creation of each note. In the above example screenshot the full Destination Path is Backups/Apple Notes/[FORMATTED-DATE-VARIABLE].txt
     • Where [FORMATTED-DATE-VARIABLE] is the variable from the previous step and you yourself type .txt at the end

If you set it up in this way, you will be able to export all your desired notes with a single button click!

They will look like this:

https://preview.redd.it/dx7gu5ej2c2h1.png?width=328&format=png&auto=webp&s=d7a71d7ea49734d6ed575020c65e2947154f43d8

I was able to export almost 900 text-based notes in this way without any issue whatsoever. It takes some time for a large amount of notes and you have to make sure your phone stays on the shortcuts screen, but it works.

Note: Double check the number of notes in your Dropbox upon completion and make sure its the same as the number of notes you wanted to export.

There you have it, a relatively clean and easy way to export all your text-based notes from Apple Notes to your Windows PC/Laptop.