We’re excited to announce the release of a significant update to Evernote’s infrastructure: RENT—an all-new metadata sync process. We’ll explain later what RENT is and how it works, but for now let’s dive straight into the most important information.
Prefer to watch? Product lead Federico Simionato shares an overview of how our new metadata sync process improves your Evernote experience.
Here’s how your Evernote experience will improve going forward
With RENT, key operations are executed up to three times faster. These include:
- Device-to-device syncing. Important account-based changes made on Desktop will show up on Mobile right away (and vice versa).
- Note sharing. You’ll see shared notes appear in your account almost instantly.
- App startup time. The launch experience on all your devices will be smoother and quicker than ever.
Plus…
- Product development will accelerate. By replacing the legacy metadata sync process, we’re able to unify all sync-related tasks under one system. This makes developing and releasing new product improvements much more straightforward, leading to an overall faster development pace.
- The Evernote database on your device is now up to 70% smaller and 20% faster. While this isn’t something you immediately notice when you use Evernote, it can go a long way toward improving the app’s overall efficiency.
So… what is RENT?
RENT metadata sync is a direct counterpart to the work we did in 2023, when we introduced real-time note editing and instantaneous content syncing across different devices and accounts. While these past improvements focused on the content within your notes, the process powering RENT—which stands for Remaining ENTities—focuses on syncing other important information within your account, such as notes, notebooks, workspaces, tags, profiles, sharing permissions, and so on. Or, as we like to call it, your metadata. ✨
Here are just a of the important ways metadata is integrated into your account:
- Do you have a note in your account? (yes, it’s that basic!)
- Does your note or notebook have a name?
- Did you delete a note, or move it to another notebook?
- When was the note or notebook last edited, and by who?
- Who has access to a particular note or notebook?
- And many more!
Syncing all this information over multiple sessions and across different devices is essential to keeping your account up-to-date and working properly. Previously, devices worked on a “polling” system, receiving updates from Evernote at predetermined intervals. This created a lag in showing changes across different accounts and devices. Thanks to our new metadata sync process, Evernote’s backend is now constantly sharing updates with the clients, making sure each change is reflected right away.
RENT is another huge step towards better platform reliability
Since early 2023, we’ve given the highest priority to increasing Evernote's reliability and stability. One of the most important initiatives in this work stream has been switching key parts of the product’s code away from the Evernote Monolith to faster and leaner micro-services. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Monolith, it’s a rather large and clunky part of Evernote’s legacy codebase that has the tendency to cause our developers quite a few headaches.)
With RENT, we can finally align all of Evernote’s sync processes under one unified system, which helps us further reduce our dependence on the Monolith and significantly reduces product complexity. This, in turn, reduces the possibility of introducing bugs during development and—ultimately—improves reliability— a positive chain reaction that will benefit developers and customers alike.
While we've done our best to keep your Evernote experience exactly the same (just faster!), it's possible some of your workflows may change as a result of our new sync structure. Please contact our team if you have any questions or experience any problems.
RENT is currently available for all Evernote accounts using version 10.101 and up. Have you noticed that syncing, sharing, or app start-ups are faster? Let us know! Tag @evernote on all social media.