What is Bloom and why does it exist? Bloom is an org-mode compatible Android app for note-taking and task management. I was a long time Orgzly Revived user and there were certain pain points I wanted solved, like capture templates, bookmarks, nicer UI, better themes, handling sync conflicts, etc. I wanted to solve this for myself and spent a few months working on the app. I announced it on r/emacs (https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1w35r88/grove_an_and...) a few weeks ago and it is now available on F-Droid and Play Store.
Features
I want to list out some of the features here (copied over from my announcement post on r/emacs):
- Beautiful UI with read and edit modes that offer a really nice viewing experience (rendering headings, plain text, formatted content, tags, dates, drawers, todo keywords, etc) and easy editing with a formatting toolbar that sits above the keyboard.
- Handle sync conflicts by showing a diff between current version and incoming copy and select between either of them or keep both
- Capture templates that is rich with placeholders like %t, %? and even %^{prompt}
- App shortcuts for easy access to capture templates
- Agenda view with a separate section for overdue tasks that offers a one-click "move to today" to bulk reschedule all overdue items to today
- Agenda widget with a quick add overlay to quickly add tasks
- Ability to refile by drilling down to a specific heading, choose the last refiled location or use the ARCHIVE property in the heading, its ancestors or what's defined in the file-level preface.
- Ability to auto archive done tasks so that your todo list is clean and you don't have to manually clean up tasks
- Setting scheduled/deadline with support for repeater cookies that also have nice explanations for each (I kept forgetting them). It also supports shorthand entry like "d: fri 10-11am ++1w"
- Ability to pin specific org files to the top of the list for easy access
- Bookmark specific headings in the sidebar for easy access
- Support for nested folders
- Orgzly-compatible search expressions + visual filtering by including/excluding various facets in the UI
- Ability to import/export your settings
- Tons of themes. Two official Bloom Light and Dark themes, some custom themes and some popular ones like Catppuccin, Rose Pine Dawn/Moon, Tokyo Night, etc
- Notifications for both tasks with a set time as well as a daily digest notification telling you how many tasks you have for the day.
There are more features than what I've listed here. You'll stumble upon them as you use the app. I'd really appreciate it if you give it a try.
How to get the app? - F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.rrajath.grove - Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rrajath.gr... - GitHub Releases: https://github.com/rrajath/bloom/releases
Full disclosure: LLMs were involved. But so was I. I spent a lot of time reading through the code that was generated, modifying code, tweaking things, regularly improving performance and redoing certain features over and over again so that I could get it right.
One last thing. This app has no tracking, no data collection, no ads, no monetization, no paywall. I hate all of that and I don't want to put users through a shitty experience just to make a few bucks. It will forever be free. I'm very grateful for the Emacs community and it's such a joy to use emacs on a daily basis, I just wanted to share a nice (well, subjective!) app experience.