The Greatest App of All Time Day 22: Flashlight vs. Evernote

It’s Day 20 of Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to name the greatest app of all time and we’re inching closer to the elite eight! Swiftkey was eliminated by Duolingo in yesterday’s head-to-head. Today, we have crowd favorite Flashlight going up against Evernote.

If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. Check out the full bracket of contestants embedded below. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.

Apple Unveils Its iPhone 15 and Apple Watch Series 9

Here’s what we had to say about Swiftkey in the first round:

For many, the flashlight app is no app at all. It’s a built-in utility on most smartphones these days. But that wasn’t always the case. In 2010, a full two years after the App Store launched, Apple finally allowed apps to use the camera flash on the iPhone 4 as a continuous flashlight. Many, many developers jumped in on the immediate gold rush.

By 2013, there were more than a thousand flashlight apps in the App Store, and then the good times came crashing down when Apple added its native flashlight function. Whoever was still making money in the crowded field was out of business and more than a few physical flashlight manufacturers probably felt the pain as well.

The flashlight app does one thing, and the thing it does is useful. That’s something that countless apps cannot claim.

And here’s what we wrote about Evernote last time:

I’m of the mind that the best app for notes is the one you use. I know that there is a large ecosystem of feature-rich notes apps out there but I still use Apple’s boring old Notes because that’s where my notes are and I don’t want to make the move. But the fact is, people get very passionate about their favorite note-takers and there was a time when Evernote inspired extreme loyalty in its users.

Evernote rose to dominance with its ability to sync notes across devices and its openness to various forms of media like photos, video, and web content. That stuff is par for the course these days but when it launched in 2008, Evernote’s organizational prowess and flexibility were unparalleled. It was so popular, the company even launched a special moleskin notebook that used a custom tagging system to upload and organize your IRL notes.

These days, Evernote fans are hard to find. A quick Google search will reveal hundreds of forum posts proclaiming the app dead. In 2023, it imposed serious restrictions on free users and lost even more clients. But it’s still chugging along thanks to the headache of moving elsewhere.