With 34m users and the slogan "Remember everything", Evernote has become one of the most popular consumer-focused cloud services since it launched in 2008. Not least because 1.4m of those users are paying for it.

The service helps people to capture text, web pages, photos and sounds and access them from a range of devices: computers, smartphones and tablets. In recent times, Evernote has also launched and acquired standalone apps for specific tasks, such as Skitch, Evernote Food, Penultimate and Evernote Hello.

I sat down with chief executive Phil Libin before his appearance at the LeWeb London conference in June, to talk about the company's growth, and how he sees the world of apps and cloud services.

"One of our greatest strengths, but also our greatest challenges, is that our 34m users are using Evernote in slightly different ways," says Libin.

"That's great as a platform, but even power users feel they're only using 10% of it. One of the big things we're focusing on right now is feature discovery: we want people to be engaged, rather than just using whatever the 5% is that you happen to find first."

Libin says this doesn't mean over-complicating Evernote or hitting users with a barrage of options and features – quite the opposite, in fact.

"We used to put function first, but now we put experience first. It took us years to figure this out, though!" he says.

"When you're in a design session, if the answer is 'make that configurable, put in a preference for this', that's almost always not the right answer. It's the lazy way out: you're leaving it up to the user to do the work of figuring things out."

Mobile has been a big part of Evernote's growth: Libin says 75% of users have their first experience of the service on a mobile phone, and that the company's most profitable customers are the ones who use its service across multiple devices.

This is despite – or more accurately because of – the fact that Evernote doesn't pressure its free users to upgrade. "People love to buy things, they just hate being sold to," says Libin.

"Once you actually like a brand, it feels good to spend a little bit of money. It's like Apple stores: nobody ever tries to sell me something there – they don't have big 'three days only!' sales. They try to create a brand and a culture that I really like, that makes me want to spend money."

Libin says he's patient about this as it applies to Evernote: he's talked publicly before about the way people are more likely to pay – and pay more – the longer they have been using the service.

Trust is a big part of that, which filters into issues like piracy, which is currently a hot potato for Facebook and other free-to-use web services. Libin says Evernote has been able to sidestep the debate.

"It fundamentally comes down to the business model. We don't make money off your data: our revenues do not depend on us being clever with your information, but for a lot of other companies that's exactly their business model," he says.

"They immediately have this tension between the customer's desire to have their data private, and the company's desire to make money. For us, we only make money if you use the product so much that you're in love with it, and you choose to pay for something you don't have to pay for. But it's easier for us to do that than Google, Facebook or Twitter."

Another challenge for these companies is how to manage their platforms for third-party developers making apps and sites, particularly if (well, when) those apps and sites may compete with or complicate the parent service's business model. Facebook and most recently Twitter have been criticised on this score.

Evernote has its own thriving ecosystem of developers, and an annual "Devcup" contest offering more than $100k in prizes for "the next generation of memorable apps".

Yet with the company adding new features to its main apps and launching new spin-offs, how does Libin avoid similar controversies about squashing developers' business models?

"Again, it's easier for us than it is for Facebook or Twitter: our developer ecosystem isn't as big, so we're able to give a little bit more individualised attention, and talk to almost every developer that's working with us," he says.

"I don't think anyone's really figured out how to have a good developer community, but our approach is to try to be maximally transparent as a company about our plans, particularly to developers. We don't want to turn around and undercut them."

Evernote's app strategy is interesting, though – not least because it has certain similarities with what Facebook is doing with its own standalone apps.

Evernote Food is an app used to "preserve and relive memorable food experiences" – photos of dishes, tagged with locations and other data, and stored in Evernote's cloud. Evernote Hello does a similar job for people: an aide-memoire for contacts that builds up into a history of meetings.

The latter "isn't meant to be a long-term separate app" according to Libin. "Remembering people should be a core feature in Evernote, but we wanted to spend a year or two really innovating on the UX side, and when we find a perfect user experience, we'll roll it back into the product."

Libin adds that doing this in a separate app is a way to try out new interfaces and ideas without worrying about the impact if they're introduced into the main app and used by 10m people straight away, while still in their experimental stage.

Now think of what Facebook has done with Facebook Messenger and Facebook Camera on iOS, which smacks of a similar strategy – even if the social network also has work to do to improve its sluggish main app on that platform.

Libin is big on user experience. As a last question, I ask him what technology trends are currently exciting him, and he picks one: the way "the definition of user experience is shifting".

How? Libin says that Apple's achievement has been to teach the world that user experience is "the single most important thing", albeit on single devices.

"The next battle is not single devices, but your 360-degree user experience," he says. "How does everything you interact with work, across every device? The companies that had big advantages in the single-device experience don't necessarily have the same advantages in that world."

Why? "In the DNA of that, you're going to have to be open: it won't be one company that makes all this stuff." Apple might disagree – Samsung and Sony too – but Libin thinks there are opportunities for more open hardware and software makers.

"We need to have the best of Silicon Valley software combining with the best of what's going on in Japan and Korea, and then from Europe the idea of thinking about how to have a good lifestyle," he says.