While Apple’s native iPhone and iPad apps usually offer pretty basic features, I find the Notes app to be particularly useful for simple note taking. With iOS 8 Apple introduced the ability to add photos to notes, which I really like. The other reason I find Apple Notes particularly useful is the iCloud syncing. Turn this on in Settings -> iCloud -> Notes and your notes will always be saved across all your devices. Even on a computer visiting iCloud.com will give access to your notes so you can edit them there. If all you need is basic, no-nonsense writing capability, Apple Notes might be all you need and its already on your device.

Apple Notes is just one of our favorite notes apps for iPhone and iPad. We’ve collected all of our favorites here. And if you’d like to see more of our top app selections in different categories, just head on over to our Best Apps Series.

Here are a couple of our other picks of the best notes apps for iPhone and iPad:

Nebulous Notes for iPhone and iPad – Create, edit, and sync .txt files across the web

Do you consider yourself a minimalist? If so, you probably hate all the clutter that comes from many writing apps. For this reason, quite a few journalists have switched away from Microsoft Word and prefer writing in simple text files. Not only do text (.txt) files give an undistracting writing ...

Notability – Take great notes on iPhone and iPad

Notability was an amazing iPad-only note taking app. Now its available on the iPhone as a universal app, and its been redesigned in a great way! Once you start using it you'll know why. The beautiful user interface is just the start. Soon you'll be bullet-pointing and creating sleek outlines ...