Papertrail bugged like no other

TaskPaper
1

iPhone 17pro, iOS 26.4.2

Hello, I was so glad to find a TaskPaper client for iOS… until I was sooooo disappointed by the incredible number of bugs: lost of data (I was saved by the “revert to” function in TaskPaper for Mac), folder disorganized, blank lines addition between folders, no respect of tabulations when hitting return in a paragraph and so on.

A shame, big shame, especially when there is no way to try before to pay. 18€ for garbage.

Georges, France

2

Thanks for you post.

I would suggest giving the dev a little more room to respond positively and fix.

It sucks that there are bugs and I’m sorry you had to run into them. At the same time it would be valuable to everyone of there was a good TaskPaper iOS client, and I am unlikely to build one. To my eye (of just playing around) PaperTrail is still a good candidate for TaskPaper on iOS.

I think it would help a lot of you could provide specific examples of each of your cases. I don’t know quality of PaperTrail code, but to me the polish in app looks pretty great. And the feedback/development cycles in forum discussion also looks good/healthy. I bet if you report each bug that you run into with detail you’ll see positive results.

  • “Folder disorganized”. I’m not sure what this means? Are you referring to what TaskPaper calls “Projects”. And in what way did it get disorganized, how to reproduce this problem?

  • “Blank lines addition between folder”. This is clearer, but still if you could break it out into an example it would be easier to quickly understand/fix.

  • “No respect for tabulation when hitting return” Again example will help get it fixed. I just tried this and was about to write you back and say “it does work for me”, then I tried from middle of paragraph and see what you mean. Indent is respected at end of paragraph, just not when return in middle. Definitely a bug, but shouldn’t be too hard for dev to fix. But they may think the same thing that I did when first reading… "already works!”

I expect the developer does very much want these things fixed. While at the same time if a user comes at me with negative language without many details, it’s difficult to find the energy to investigate.

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PaperTrail: my TaskPaper iOS client (out now!)
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FWIW I’ve found it useful and well-executed :slight_smile:

Very early days, and I’m sure the dev will be responsive to well-crafted reports of reproducible glitches.

Experiment is the only way of discovering these things, and a whole lot of users, each approaching from a different angle, is a very powerful experiment.

2 Likes
4

Hello,

I’ll try to give some more details on my poor experience with PaperTrail, given the fact that English is not my mother language and that I’ll never return to this app because of the sync and the risk of loosing what I already wrote in TaskPaper for Mac. Coding an app is not that easy, that’s OK, but I repeat that we should have a way to try it before to buy it, especially at that price. And before beginning, I have to say that problems seem happening in a random way, so it is difficult to reproduce them systematically.

  1. When I was using the term “folder”, sure I was meaning “project”. “Disorganized” means that the projects sometimes were no more organized the way I did it (mixed if this is correct in English).
  2. Yes, Jesse, you’re right, there is no respect for tabulation when hitting return in the middle of a paragraph.
  3. It seems that blank lines (sometimes 10 or even more) are added when you want to add or substract a blank line between two projects (unfolded or not, I can’t remember). But I am not sure.
  4. I forgot a one more terrible bug : the folders and content happen to be duplicated two, three times (when you look at the tree structure) in a random way or maybe it is linked with the problem of content disorganized or the one of the blank lines added. What a mess!

If I remember something else, I’ll write it down. It is difficult for me to be more precise, since I do not want to use this app anymore, at least before some important fixes happen. I hope this post will help, waiting for return from other users.

Georges

5

Thanks for the feedback.

From one human to another, I appreciate it.

My goal is to reproduce and fix and every single bug that is reported. To do so I need good information and the ability the reproduce, otherwise it’s very difficult maybe even impossible.

We had a really great testing period from August 2025 to March 2026. I have automated tests for as much as possible. I can add more, I can make it bulletproof! I have fixed every issue I have encountered myself, and I use the app every day (that’s why I made it!). I need help to find and fix things I haven’t encountered myself.

I understand you would rather have had a trial of the app. Sadly this is not so easy in the App Store, at least not without a lot more work adding in-app purchases. I’m sorry you don’t agree with my decision on pricing.

Regarding file saving syncs. PaperTrail is just the editor, so does no sync at all itself, everything is handled by iOS: saves after every edit, after every file close. So, if PaperTrail loses data whilst editing, and we can reproduce, you have my attention! If data is lost outside of PaperTrail it is something I have no control over. So it’s important to describe what happened.

Your issues:

  1. Unsure?
  2. I can add this, it’s not a bug it’s just a feature I did not consider
  3. I have tests for this, it passes. if we can find the hole in the tests, I can fix it
  4. Unsure?

A little story

I had a user contact me, very angry that my app does not auto save. They sent many multiple messages stating this. But… the app does auto save! I sent step by step instructions to prove it. Then they were happy (well, happier than before) and with this new information they chanhed their view. So we tracked the problem down to something outside of PaperTrail. We worked together. I’m happy to continue doing so.

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