Where InkBoard Notes Actually Live: On Your Device, and the App Says So | InkBoard

The short answer

Your notes and canvases live in the app's own directory inside its container, and Settings reports that state rather than implying it. There is no account, and no sync button pretending to work: the iCloud Sync row in Settings is visibly disabled, reads "Sync isn't available yet" and "On This Device", and tapping it changes nothing — there is no iCloud entry in the document-list menu at all, because there is nothing behind it.

What that buys is a genuinely account-free notebook whose privacy claim you can check in a minute instead of take on faith. What it costs is that the only copy of your work is the copy on the one device you wrote it on. InkBoard runs on iOS 17 and later.

Why this question is hard to answer anywhere else

Ask a notes app where your notes are stored and you usually get a marketing sentence. The literal question — which folder, in what format, what leaves the device — is the one nobody answers, and the gap hides three that people conflate:

• Where on the device, in a form I could back up myself?
• What actually leaves the device — only the notes, or other things too?
• If I uninstall tomorrow, or lose the phone, what is left?

Three usual answers each fail one of those. A greyed cloud icon in the navigation bar leaves you guessing whether sync is off, broken, or merely loading. A sign-in button tells you a server exists, not that anything you write reaches it. A policy saying data is encrypted in transit answers none of the three.

InkBoard's position is narrow: answer the first question with a file path, refuse to pretend about the second, and make the third a consequence you can reason about before committing anything.

Where your documents actually live

A note is not a row in a database. Each document is a file package — a directory named after its id, with a .inkboard extension, holding a manifest and its page data, under ~/Library/InkBoard/Documents/. The library lists your notes by reading only each manifest, never opening page files, which is why the list stays fast with large documents in it.

Three concrete readouts, all on-device:

• Documents: ~/Library/InkBoard/Documents/{id}.inkboard/ per note.
• Search index: Library/Application Support/InkBoard/search-index.json, indexing handwriting, text cards, and the native text layer of inserted PDFs.
• Settings: a library overview headed "Your Library", subtitled "Stored on this device", with two live counts — Notes and Pages.

The page count is summed across every document when the overview loads, not cached at creation. When the load fails, both metrics read "Unavailable" rather than showing the last value they managed to read; while loading, they show a loading state. That matters more than it sounds: "Stored on this device" is only worth reading if the numbers beside it are being read now.

The search index is the part nobody expects to be local. Handwriting is indexed without being converted to text first — entries carry their source: a recognised stroke, a text card, or a PDF's own text layer. A word you scribbled three months ago is findable, and what does the finding is a file on your device, not a service.

What the disabled iCloud row is actually telling you

Under the Storage section there is one row: "iCloud Sync", subtitle "Sync isn't available yet", trailing value "On This Device", drawn with a struck-through cloud glyph.

It is not greyed out for looks. The row reports itself as both not enabled and not actionable, and the action behind it is an empty handler — tap it and the screen does not change. That is verified in the app's own interface tests rather than asserted in a comment. And in the document list's folder menu an iCloud item is deliberately absent: the same idea, expressed by leaving it out instead of leaving it in.

Most apps pick one of three poor routes. Hide the affordance and let you infer the answer from silence. Grey the row and leave you wondering whether it is off, broken, or waiting on a server. Or ship the button and fail quietly, which teaches you to distrust every other screen.

The rule underneath is stricter than honesty: a capability which does not exist does not appear anywhere as an option. The same rule governs the paywall — the Pro list is derived from the app's actual gate calls, and unfinished capabilities go on neither the free list nor the paid one. There is no "coming soon" row, because a coming-soon list is just a list of things that will disappoint you later.

What local-only actually costs

• One device. No second iPhone or iPad. What you wrote on an iPad is on that iPad.
• No sharing or collaboration. Nothing in the free list or the Pro list is a share link, a shared notebook, or a multi-user document. The shipped surface is six free capabilities and four Pro ones.
• Uninstalling removes the container. The documents directory lives inside the app sandbox, so removing the app removes it — exactly what "on-device" implies.
• Bulk export is Pro. Single-page PDF, PNG or JPEG is free; whole-notebook PDF and Print are Pro. For a free user planning an exit the path out is page by page — see what the free and Pro tiers include.

One asset in that list is better than it looks. Because documents are real files in a real directory rather than rows in someone else's database, the natural insurance is the device backup you already have — and the format is a path you can go and look at.

No account — and what still touches the network

"No account" is structural, not cosmetic. There is no sign-in, no demo account in the App Store submission, and no server-side identity to create. The same submission declares that the app does not host or distribute third-party content, and carries an age rating with no advertising, no messaging or chat, no user-generated content distribution, and no unrestricted web access.

Two permissions ship, both for the same job — putting images into notes and boards:

• Photo library, for inserting images. The rationale shown to iOS states that everything stays on-device.
• Camera, for photographing straight into a note.

Both are read-and-insert. Neither browses your library in the background.

One qualifier, because "nothing leaves the device" is the wrong sentence: the build is configured with a hosted analytics project, so usage analytics are wired in. Your documents stay local; the app is not silent about itself being used.

What to check in the first five minutes

This claim is falsifiable, so falsify it:

1. Open Settings. The iCloud row says "Sync isn't available yet" and "On This Device".
2. Read the library overview: "Your Library", "Stored on this device", with Notes and Pages counts.
3. Write a page, come back. The numbers moved.
4. Hunt for an account screen, a sign-in prompt, or a sync toggle in the document list. There isn't one.

Four steps, no purchase, no registration — and if any of them fails, the privacy claim was marketing.

What InkBoard does differently — and where it is behind

The readout is the feature. Most apps spend the storage screen selling the next tier. InkBoard spends it telling you what is true: a live library overview, an honest subtitle, and a dead row that admits it is dead — a smaller promise than "your notes are safe in the cloud", and a far more checkable one.

• Storage state is displayed, not implied — location, live counts, an explicit unavailable state.
• Nothing phantom appears as an option — no disabled sync button in the document list, no coming-soon rows, no unimplemented capability on either side of the paywall.
• The free tier is derived from what the code actually gates: three notebooks with every pen and tool, unlimited pages, templates, folders, all card types (image, text, PDF, widget), document scanning, single-page PDF/PNG/JPEG export, and handwriting search across every note.

And the honest limits, which are not small:

• No sync is a real gap, not a footnote. One device, no second device, no collaboration.
• The product is still in development. Its Portal entry lists it as such, and that disabled row is a live statement of it rather than a permanent design stance.
• Bulk export sits behind Pro, so a free user's clean exit is slower than a paying user's.
• Local-only concentrates risk. The property that makes the privacy claim true makes a wiped device a total loss, with no server-side copy to fall back on.

The decision you can now make

If your requirement is "open my notes on any device, any time, without thinking about it", this is the wrong app — and its own Settings page says so before you install, which beats discovering it after a semester of notes.

If your requirement is "I write on one iPad, the notes stay there, and I am not handing over an account" — then a disabled row with an honest label is a better signal than a sync button that looks alive. One of those you can verify in five minutes; the other only by losing something.

InkBoard is on iOS 17 and later, requires no account, and asks for nothing at install time. For the rest of the picture, read how notes and whiteboards share one document, then check the Storage section yourself.