Notability 16 arrived a while back, and it brings some of the most meaningful updates we’ve seen in years. From proper collaboration tools to new productivity features. This version feels like a real step forward for anyone who relies on handwritten notes—whether in the classroom, at work, or for personal projects. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Let’s walk through what Notability 16 gets right, where it still needs improvement, and why these changes matter.
We now have proper collaboration tools
Sharing notes for teams is finally here, and the ability to build a whole business organisation inside the app changes everything. Design teams will love it. Honestly, any team that prefers brainstorming with handwriting will feel right at home. It all finally makes sense.
Collaboration also works beautifully for individuals. You get proper permissions—your collaborators can either edit or only view your notes. Links can be public so anyone with the link can join, or you can lock them down to invited people only. At long last, Notability has real collaboration. This is a massive game changer. In the classroom especially, I can already see teachers marking work more easily and students working together even when they’re miles apart. It’s a great time to be in education—and a great time to be on a team that loves whiteboards and messy brainstorming.
The pains of collaborating in Notability
But there is one big drawback: invitations simply don’t come, unless you share a link. Sending a link isn’t hard, and frankly every other note-taking app is doing that. But when you can’t collaborate on entire folders yet, it becomes tedious fast. And personally I always want more perfection from Notability than other apps. Invitations should, at least, appear inside the app. Maybe it’s just me, but that workflow needs love. Some connection to Messages, perhaps. Something to save me the pain of leaving the app to go share a link in another app. Anything.Â
We also need a smart folder for shared documents right on the homepage. Preferably with options to filter what you’ve shared, and what others have shared with you. But once you get past that, you’re looking at the best collaboration experience we’ve ever seen in a handwriting note‑taking app. The pixel‑perfect syncing I love with audio recording? They’ve brought that awesomeness to collaboration. Watching someone write in your notes in real time is insane! Notability might be late to the party, but when they finally show up, they perfect things in ways we’ve never imagined. If that’s not fantastic, I don’t know what is.
Quiz sharing now works even with people who don’t use Notability. But, the AI features in Notability deserve their own article entirely. Because we haven’t covered them yet. And we must. Still, there’s room to grow. We need real‑time chat, or comments, and a way to quickly find notes we’re collaborating on. Once those arrive, collaboration will be flawless.
Outlines for your documents
Notability 16 can now recognize outlines in documents that already have them. Really happy to have that because it does ease our navigation of long documents. Unfortunately, we still can’t create our own outlines, which feels limiting. Most handwriting apps let us add pages to our outlines in 2026. But hey—progress is progress. I do wish the sidebar was resizable, a little more space would go a long way. Ideally, it would work like the AI tool’s sidebar, where you can stretch it to see more detail. That way, it can better accommodate long titles.
‘More depth’ for folders
Folders now go six levels deep instead of five. I was mildly unimpressed. When they said more levels, I thought we’re finally going infinitely deeper. To be fair, we don’t need more folder level. The biggest change to folders in Notability 16 is probably their name. No more dividers and subjects—just folders. Clean, modern, and much less confusing. We can also use emojis for your subjects now, which adds personality to the homepage in a way those old colored dots never could. Overall, Notability 16 feels more polished. The settings look refined, and for the first time since I have known the app, the themes are genuinely beautiful. They make the plain colours feel… plain.
Smaller updates worth mentioning
The study timer is another lovely addition. You can choose your session length, break time, and number of rounds. The countdown is adorable, and you can place it anywhere on your screen.
These updates are genuinely exciting. So exciting that I’ve gone back to using Notability. Remember the voluntary tutoring I mentioned a couple of months ago? It’s going much better than I expected, and MarginNote was starting to feel like overkill. I began in Apple Notes, letting students write answers on rough pages, but for structure, I needed something more robust—Notability. More on that some other time, though.
What do you think of Notability 16? Did I miss anything? I haven’t looked at the app in a while, so I might be a little rusty.