Launched this week
Zuka
Your brain doesn't work in pages. So why do your notes?
14 followers
Your brain doesn't work in pages. So why do your notes?
14 followers
Notes have always been flat pages. ZUKA gives them a new shape: a thread. Every note becomes something you can talk back to, reply to, react to, label and branch a tangent into its own thread instead of cramming it where it doesn't belong. ndani runs on your phone and spots when two notes are really the same idea, then offers to merge them. No account, no cloud. Notes that finally keep up with you.
Hey Everyone 👋
Let's be honest about note-taking apps for a second. We've all got the same graveyard. A pile of notes, a search bar we pray to, and that one note titled "ideas" with 47 unrelated lines fighting for their lives inside it. Note-taking hasn't really changed in years. We just got prettier boxes to type into.
Here's what finally got me. The problem was never the writing, it was the shape. A note is a flat page. The big modern upgrade was... a longer flat page you scroll forever. But that's not how you use notes, and it's definitely not how your head works. You don't write something once and seal it. You add to it. You argue with it. You go "actually, scratch that." A real note is a running thing, not a tombstone you carve once and abandon.
So I built ZUKA, where every note is a thread you can talk back to.
Sounds small. Changes everything. Instead of one note per topic slowly turning into an unreadable wall, you reply to your own notes. You react to the line that actually matters so it stops drowning. You label the bits worth finding later. And you branch, so when one note quietly grows a whole second topic, you split off into its own thread instead of bloating the original into chaos.
And here's the part I love. It doesn't care what you throw at it. The same simple move bends into whatever your brain is currently doing:
🛠️ A dev log where you interrogate a decision from last week, with the original reasoning ready to defend itself.
📚 Study notes where your calm "spaced recall beats cramming" note answers your own 2am exam panic.
✍️ A messy project where a tangent worth keeping finally gets its own thread instead of derailing the main one.
🍳 A recipe you keep tweaking.
A trip you're slowly planning. A book you're picking a fight with. A side hustle you're talking yourself into.
That last list is the point, really. I keep finding new ways to use it and so does everyone I hand it to, because it's not "a journaling app" or "an ideas app," it's just notes that finally keep up with you. You bring the use case. ZUKA just helps.
Now the part I'm genuinely proud of. Meet ndani. It runs entirely on your phone and does one quietly clever thing: it reads under your words and notices when two of your threads are secretly about the same thing, then offers to pull them together. The first time it caught that my "morning routine" notes and my "sleep" notes were the same note wearing two different hats, I said "okay, rude" out loud. It does not reorganise your stuff behind your back. It raises its hand. It suggests. You decide.
The clever bit is in the name, ZUKA means "emerge" in Swahili and NDANI means "within." So the entire app is one sentence. Your ideas emerge from within. From you, on your device. Not from a template, not from a cloud, not from a server quietly reading your notes for "personalization".
Which brings me to an important bit: nothing leaves your phone. No account. No cloud. . The honest catch is it's local-first, so you own your backups and deleting the app also deletes your notes.
🤖 Heads up: ZUKA is Android only today. iOS is coming.
So genuinely, I want to know: what would you point this at first? I keep getting answers I never expected. 👇
🌐 zuka.abubunamay.com
Curious how the duplicate spotting actually works on device, is it just keyword overlap or something smarter that catches reworded ideas.
the idea of letting a note branch into its own thread when it veers off is such a clean fix for that cramped “where do I put this” feeling in other apps. love that it all stays local with no account too, really respects your thinking.
the threading idea is such a natural fix for how notes actually grow in real life, instead of forcing everything into folders. love that it runs on device too, no account setup is a quietly confident choice.
The branching idea into its own thread instead of burying it in a page is genuinely clever. Love that ndani merges duplicates locally too.