Hey everyone! I’m super curious what everyone’s experience with sync across Apple devices is (excluding Web).
In my own experience sync is often annoyingly slow and I wonder if there are issues on my end or if it’s just the standard experience and my expectations are wrong.
Basically, for me there is no such thing asbackground sync. Every time I open the app on my iPhone after editing a note on my mac I have to wait for up to a minute for the sync to start and complete, otherwise I get hit with conflicts. On my iPad where I don’t open Bear as often notes are often months out of sync and I have to wait for 10+ minutes for the sync to complete (the app has to remain open otherwise the process is interrupted).
Have you also experienced this or does the sync work better for you? Please share!
(I have read the very outdated-looking sync troubleshooting guide and everything seems to be set up accordingly on my end)
I have the same experience, background sync as I would expect it (syncing my notes on a device that is locked, but has a network connectivity), is not working at all.
I am very interested in the response of one of the Devs here.
Yes, this has been my experience as well - background sync does not occur. That said, when I open the app, sync occurs very quickly (much faster than other apps I’ve tried like Obsidian, and more reliably than Apple Notes which I’ve experienced issues with lately).
I have tested the background sync on iOS and it seems to work. Unfortunately, the background execution time provided by iOS to apps is not under developers’ control, as it’s designed to preserve the device battery. It can also kill the background process if another event occurs or if it’s taking too much time. Also, when in energy-saving mode/low battery, iOS is less likely to provide any background execution.
Just in case, check the following options
Checking Settings > General > Background App Refresh
I remember managing to have it work after turning the switch off/on, but this was definitely on older iOS releases
@trix180 thanks for taking a look! Unfortunately even after trying all of the above background sync doesn’t really work either on my iPhone or my iPad mini. I wonder if this problem is only present on older devices (my 11 Pro is ~5 years old).
Do you think it would be possible to at least mark modified notes as such and lock them until they’re synced in the foreground? Maybe the background task lifetime would be enough for that. It would help avoid conflicts which are really annoying.
We don’t have a lot of information regarding how background mode works on iOS, but it sounds reasonable that, with the deterioration of the battery, less time is given to apps to preserve the device’s active time.
Regardless of the possible problem emerging with a note locked state, is pretty much the same problem. If the background time is not granted and the note is edited on another device, the iOS Bear can’t lock the note in the background.
I want to add my own experience here, because this issue is very consistent for me and makes certain workflows unreliable.
Every morning I use an Apple Shortcut on my iPhone that creates a daily note in Bear. When I arrive at work and open Bear on my Mac, that note is often not there. The only way to make it appear is to quit Bear on my Mac, open Bear on my iPhone, and then reopen Bear on the Mac. This happens almost daily.
What makes it worse: I also have a second shortcut that appends text to today’s daily note. If that note hasn’t synced yet, the shortcut silently fails and I lose the input without realizing it. That makes the whole setup fragile and unpredictable.
What really surprised me is that I’ve seen Bear on iOS report “last sync: 2 days ago”, even though Background App Refresh is enabled and the app is used daily. I’m not expecting constant background syncing, but I do expect that:
a note created on iOS is pushed to iCloud reasonably quickly
opening Bear on macOS would then pull that change without having to “wake” the iPhone app first
I understand iOS background limitations, but this feels less like a platform limitation and more like sync not being triggered proactively unless the iOS app is foregrounded. Curious if others experience the same, or if there are specific settings that actually help — because right now this is my biggest pain point with Bear.
I experience something similar. Notes I create on iOS often do not show up on Mac, and I have to open Bear on iPhone and wait a few seconds, or make a tiny edit (for example adding and removing a space) to trigger sync.
I have also noticed comparable behavior in other apps that rely on iCloud sync, so I am not sure this is strictly a Bear issue. Still, it is annoying…
Just chiming in here to confirm this is a persistent issue for me as well. I don’t think it’s just an iOS/Apple background issue, as my other iCloud sync apps don’t run into this. Similar to @Dri3s I use a shortcut to generate a daily note and have a few automated shortcuts throughout the day to pull in updated Things tasks into my note. I think there is something that happens with notes that are generated or updated via shortcut that seems to cause the syncing issues (for me at least). My experience is that my Mac or iPad devices won’t sync shortcut edited notes until I open the note on my phone. Then, once I’ve opened on my phone, I typically end up with this duplicate note problem - and I’m not sure what this “merging” icon means or what to do about it other than manually delete the older note.
As this is still not resolved in the latest versions running latest MacOS I am wondering if @trix180 and the team is still looking into this, as it really makes Bear unreliable and annoying to use. I am a paying customer and expect that such a fundamental feature of the App is working as it should. This is really a severe issue for everybody who is working daily with your App!
I’m experiencing the same slow sync speeds. I’ve scaled back the notes in my Bear database from 6,000 to just under 1,000, figuring that the sheer number of notes was causing sync delays. But even with a much smaller collection, adding a note on my Mac takes more than a minute to appear on my iPhone or iPad. Sync used to be almost automatic. And it’s definitely not syncing in the background anymore.
I was importing my Day One journal into Bear as a backup and a way to link journal entries to book and knowledge notes already in Bear. I kept having database issues with notes disappearing from the sidebar and searches (see this post), so I moved my ~5,000 journal entries from Bear to Obsidian. I deleted these from Bear and re-imported them from Day One using an Obsidian plug-in. I thought the poor sync performance would be a lot faster with fewer notes, but I’ve seen no improvement.
I’m in the middle of a test to see if Obsidian can replace Bear. The jury is still out, but I will say that Obsidian Sync is 20X faster than Bear.
Sync is not perfect, but compared to every other notes app I’ve used, Bear’s sync is absolutely flawless. Speed is important, but second to stability. I have never lost edits or notes while using Bear.
My experience is the same as @Breen- Sync used to be super quick, on the level of Apple Notes. From some point (Bear 2?) it started to be extremely slow and definitely not in background. Also, sync conflicts were unheard of before, as opposed to today. I do not need my notes usually on my iOS devices so often. But when I do, sync is unfortunately one of quite annoying features of today Bear.
A follow up on slow syncing speeds in Bear that may provide a solution for some.
I use Bear with two iPads. an M1 iPad Pro and an A15 iPad mini. The iPad Pro syncs in a few seconds while the iPad mini takes upwards of a minute to sync the same data. All of the background sync and wifi settings are the same on both iPads.
I asked Claude for help in diagnosing this sync speed difference. Of all the troubleshooting steps offered, just one made any difference: on the slower iPad, I “forgot” my home WIFI network and then rejoined it. After doing this, both iPads sync very quickly. I’m guessing the iPad Mini’s WIFI connection became corrupted over time.
Your mileage may vary, but it’s an easy thing to check if you’re experiencing slow sync speeds.
