Google Pushes Update To My Favorite Productivity App. But Will Google Keep Survive?

The Awesome App

Those of you who've seen me on my phone may know how much I LOVE my Google Keep app (also here) for productivity and note-taking -- both on the desktop and on the go.

• It offers voice-typing AND transcription from any screen on your Android with one tap (Evernote doesn't). 
• It syncs seamlessly with the web app. 
• It's fast. 
• And it makes searching and archiving notes incredibly easy (think Gmail-easy, Google-smart).

Yesterday Keep gave me a pop up where it showed two conflicting versions of the same note (i.e. two notes containing slight differences) and it allowed me to select which one I want to keep. AWESOME!

This had been a huge issue in the past, especially with too-frequently unreliable networks (at least too frequent for on-the-fly edits to important notes). I'd make edits in the mobile app (let's call that v2 of the note), and lose connectivity unknowingly. The edits would get saved only locally on the mobile device, and, still unaware that they weren't synced, I'd go and make new edits on the desktop app. Thing is, I'd be making those edits to v1, and thus creating a v3, not realizing that all my edits from the mobile app (on v2) were never saved, and would -- poof! Be gone. Google Keep never saw the edits I made in v2, and behaved as if it had overwritten them entirely. Huge issue.

Once I finally realized what was going on, I got smart and jerry rigged a solution: I would copy-paste-all of my new note (v2), and then save it in a Gmail compose window until my network decided to behave again and I could replace v1 one with v2. It's not difficult to see why this was incredibly cumbersome. (And I still stuck with the app! I must have really liked the other features...)

So Keep took a page (if you'll permit the pun) from MS Word, and gave us (insert choir singing heavenly "aaah!"): version control. Totally. Rad.

And then today, we got this!

The new features are as follows:

• Printed text in images will now be searchable (what?!)
• The list capabilities have been greatly improved (you can turn a non-checklist into a checklist and choose whether crossed out items stay in their place or move to the bottom - combining one feature of Gmail Tasks and improving on it), AND 
• There is now even a Trash, so you have more than just the "Undo deleted note" feature of the past. 

These are AWESOME features. So I've got my fingers crossed that this means Google will start supporting the app a bit more (or a lot more) than they have since it was released (which was about a year ago, a week after Google Reader was sunset.)

One big, looming question is, when will there be a comparable iOS app? Currently, there are only 3rd party apps, and they're pretty shoddy. They give Keep (less than) nothing on Evernote (in iOS *only*). 

I want to surmise Google's own iOS version is on the horizon, but every iPhone user who's seen my Keep wants to switch to Android. So maybe it's better they not release the iOS app? Could a single app win over a good portion of an entire ecosystem?

The Big Worry

The other big question, of course, is whether this app will survive Google's bigger plans, regardless of its popularity. 

Google ticked off millions of users (exact figures vary) when it sunset the crazy-popular Google Reader after 8 long years of passionate romance between user and product (that's 80 years in Internet terms). They only gave users 4 months to migrate their content.

In spite of Google's assertion that the sunsetting was due to declining use (see plenty of evidence to the contrary), Reader is widely believed to have been sunset in order to redirect consumption and sharing to Google Plus (and to bring over all those Reader users) in a competitive bid against the only real behemoth in the space of purely social networks (Facebook, in case you live under an actual rock). As a former Googler, I can neither confirm nor deny those claims (NDA), but I do choose content for my blog carefully. 

At the moment (and as a private citizen with no inside info), I don't see Keep being part of a larger strategy to break into some segment Google's tentacles aren't already gripping quite firmly. But it's early yet, and anyone's guess. 

What do you think? 

Will Keep release an iOS app? Or will Google count on the Android app to convert the luddites of the War of the Mobile Platforms (aka iOS users)? 

What's the likelihood of Keep being sunset after years of fruitful love affairs with many happy users? (Insert polyamory joke here.)

Feel free to comment below.