There is plenty of room for ‘‘i just need this one feature and i swear i will download and pay for anytype” so I wanted to twist it and make the thread for people that love anytype and have been using (and paying hopefully) it as main tool for quite some time but will have to leave if something is not implemented because crucial for them.
Personally:
publish to web for whole spaces: digital gardens, wikis, low cost sites and so on. A pretty long list of use cases that I could use to tell people ‘‘just do the thing using anytype!’’. In my case, I would like to publish some org wikis and my digital garden (to show my garden i had to make around 25 people install anytype and they were not amused, more than ‘‘networking effect’’ can quickly become ‘‘bad community marketing’’ effect thanks to having siloed websites);
csv export of queries and collections views: I don’t need some hard to make export, it would be enough to export the current view just to ensure I will be able to easily translate data from anytype to other software in disaster cases. My markdown tables of films books etc are too valuable for me, I won’t embrace the queries/collections for this data unless i’m 100% sure i will be able to export it in an interoperable way.
Publish to web, for basically the same reasons as you
More importantly, now that Anytype is paid, the core editor experience should be more polished across devices. It’s often buggy on desktop and almost useless on mobile.
The missing backlinks for images!
(Btw.: I believe this should easily be possible to implement in a single hour or so!)
.
The fact that’s impossible to get exactly the same result on paper (or in a PDF) as on screen!
We have not even the tiniest control over side breaks.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t leave Anytype anymore. I’m here to stay.
But there was a time when I was on the edge because of these missing features (that I consider as basic stuff).
The fact that a variation of this topic has been appearing at certain periods of time. For me, almost nothing has changed since I left Anytype. I don’t see a clear direction for development. I’m not sure if the things I miss will ever be implemented at all. I gave up looking at the roadmap a long time ago. I had some hope for plugins that would solve the problem with the missing functionalities, but I realized that there won’t be any…
In short: I don’t even see the point in writing the things I miss once again. Sorry.
Well, I’m still using Anytype, and I still miss Excalidraw. It’s okay, not like I need it 100%, but I honestly can’t imagine anything better than Excalidraw.
Basically, the same.
I have a buggy space (no synchronization for months) with fewer things I liked and more chat (not my thing, curious to see where the hype will be in a few months). And still too many suggestions with no visibility, and so many unanswered questions.
Basic features not working out of the box as a first time user is a huge deterrent. Read my bug post to find out. Disappoining and tells me this app is just merely a concept and not ready for commercial or practical usage like Notion.
For me, the decisive factor in abandoning Anytype would be the fact that I can’t leave Anytype (I hope the pun is also understood in English).
Let me explain. What has always given me security in the past when using notetaking tools is the ability to export all my data whenever and however I want for use elsewhere. This freedom gives me courage (it’s essentially a useful backup) because I know I can start over somewhere else if something were to happen (e.g., development halt, subscription costs, inability to pay for Anytype in the future, finding an application more suited to my needs, Anytype failure).
Now I don’t have this security. The fact that I can export to practically unusable formats doesn’t reassure me.
I can accept development delays, new features I don’t use, constant bugs, and an unfriendly UX, but for me, not being sure I’ll recover my data is unacceptable.
Many notetaking apps support export and import for the most popular applications; Anytype, on the other hand, is very limited in these possibilities.
if microsoft and open office etc can kinda agree on the formats, i don’t see why logseq, obsidian, anytype, notion, tana, supernotes and all the other apps that allow an objects and blocks instead of files workflow cannot cooperate on this…
maybe it would actually be better to form a coalition for this but without notion, so there would be another pro in not using notion but using competitors “you can switch to any of these apps without losing much!!”
the exported formatting is different to the original. Italics, links, code block content (!) etc.
The importer sucks. Converts URLs to Bookmarks. Ruins links.
Those are my top 2 items. But I’d also agree with what others above have written.
Being burned on import and export makes me reluctant to make AnyType my primary PKM tool.
A tool with very decent functionality is SiYuan. At the very least, it can output all my data in standard Markdown with exactly the same structure.
That said, I’d also like to give credit where it is due. AnyType has a fantastic way of synchronizing data. Very resilient and reliable(so far). If the headless client materializes and the editor experience improves, it will be a killer app.
Technically it wouldn’t make me leave Anytype, because I’ve not migrated into Anytype for the reason many have already voiced out here; though I have been following this app for over a year now, the app is not production-grade yet.
I’m not really leaving Anytype, but I’m planning a trip with my SO and we HAVE to use Notion even if it means we’ll have to find WiFi to use it JUST BECAUSE we can’t see embedded Google Maps on mobile
My second one is related: I can’t even see a diagram (mermaid, graphviz, etc) on mobile so I can’t use it to study.
Hm, after a (small) time distance, I think I could narrow this to the top 2,
Can’t collapse headings / sections
working with links on mobile is impossible (can’t select and therefore modify/move)
Most others are minor annoyances, or I have found workarounds, or have been caused by Markdown formatting before the import.
This is really good news (for myself!). Perhaps I will be able to switch as the primary PKM sometime soon.
Without collapse or some other way to see the current location in the Page and relation to other sections, I can’t easily zoom out/in when working on a certain topic. This makes me practically working blind and only within one section.
Being unable to work with links on mobile removes 30-50% of my need to have such an app in the first place.
But I’d also agree with what others above have written.