"This launch will be a little controversial," says Johnston, "because we’ve removed some things and turned off premium upgrades." Current premium subscribers will be allowed to keep Dropbox-syncing for their notes, but Simplenote isn’t letting any new users pay. "We can’t turn premium back on until we can find a significant value we can provide," he says. "Maybe it’s Dropbox again, or themes, or…" Witkin interrupts him. "A quote I’ve been harping on from Jony Ive’s iOS 7 design video is, ‘True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It’s about bringing order to complexity.’"

Witkin’s choice of quotes is trite, but true. As competitors like Evernote have grown larger and become packed with features for recording voice notes, web clips, and locations, it’s gotten harder to hop in and write down a list of things you need to do, or jot down what groceries you need to pick up. "Evernote is a great app," Johnston says, "but as Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg always says, ‘You don’t open a letter with a chainsaw.’" For the act of creating text notes — just typing and having them appear instantly across all your devices — Simplenote is tough to beat precisely for how little else it does.

"Evernote is a great app, but as Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg always says, ‘You don't open a letter with a chainsaw.'"

It’s all made possible because of Simperium, which Automattic’s Mullenweg says will soon makes it way into everything the company does. "Simplenote and WordPress share one key characteristic: they’re about writing," says Mullenweg. "They both aspire to become invisible and be a canvas for your creativity. WordPress has succeeded above its competitors year after year because we’re ruthlessly focused on the experience of the author, and I saw the same spirit in Simplenote."

Mullenweg won’t say if and how he hopes to turn Simplenote into a profitable business. For now, he says he’s just a user, excited that the app’s being worked on again. Simplenote has no desire to be Google Docs, and has no qualms about having a more limited scope than Evernote. Which road it will go down, if any, is hard to foresee. But for now, Simplenote version 2 is a solid 1.0 experience. For the legions of users praying that Simplenote wouldn’t simply fade into the mist, that’s all they’ve been asking for.