In 2018, as part of the refactoring effort at Evernote, the decision was made to shift mobile development to React Native in an effort to reduce code duplication and, as a result, increase velocity. However, as both the iOS and Android clients had historically been very rooted in their native platform design systems, this not only meant rewriting the mobile clients, it meant redesigning them.
Given the obligation of a full redesign, we took the opportunity to fix almost everything we had been observing as customer pain points and design deficiencies in the legacy apps: new typography, a new editor, improved tag behaviors, desktop-class search and a radically improved navigational structure.