Evernote CEO’s Mea Culpa — Plans To Address App Stability, Plus A Hiring Blitz

Evernote CEO Phil Libin has responded to the scathing criticism of the company made in a blog post by former TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid. A post which ended up making headlines recently. Libin says new versions of all the apps are planned, targeting note editing, navigation, search, sync and collaboration.

He says the company has already started on these, and it now plans to focus on stability, design and simplicity – with many more hires planned to beef up their team.

Libin goes to some length to address the issues surrounding Evernote’s increasingly bloated platform, many of which are around the ecosystem of apps Evernote has built up which has led to a series of issues around bugs.

He says “reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right.” But, he adds, “We’re going to fix this.”

Specifically, he says that despite huge growth the company needs to “pause for a bit and look in rather than up,” and he promises Evernote’s “central theme” for 2014 will be “constant improvement of the core promise of Evernote.”

He says work on this started a couple of months ago, precipitated by the frustrating roll-out of their iOS 7 version, resulting in “stability problems”.

There are 164 engineers and designers working at Evernote, with 150 assigned to the core software products. He pledges the total number will increase “quite a bit” in 2014, but the proportion will stay the same. He claims that since then they’ve made a lot of progress, and Evernote is “measurably less buggy.”

Libin says App store ratings have gone from 2 stars to 4.5, customer support volumes for iOS “have been cut by more than half”.

However, he says it may well take longer for the improvements to be felt by users.

It’s an unusually candid response from what is now a pretty big company.