Back in 2021, after going through an unsustainable amount of recycled paper for my notes, I got a tablet instead. I believe Remarkable was making the rounds and the name alone probably influenced the decisions to come. Yet, Remarkable was (and still is) prohibitively expensive and wasn't available in Turkey anyway. In the end, I got a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite which comes with a pen, great for taking handwritten notes and reading papers.

Android's app landscape is different from Apple's. Searching for "android note taking stylus" and "apple note taking stylus" brings up wildly different results, you have to rely on intuition a lot to find good Android apps.

INKredible PRO is a paid note-taking application with excellent pen support. I installed it alongside many more note-taking apps and ended up purchasing it and Noteshelf, which will be relevant later.

Since 2021, I had two issues with INKredible.

One time, they changed the data folder the app was using. The support paragraph on this page with the migration steps is written as if this was an unusual requirement imposed by Android. There was also one minor bug when the app crashed when picking a stylus colour. As a good netizen, I reported both issues, recovered from backups or found workarounds, and moved on.

However, there is no way I could anticipate the bug I had last week.

Doing a first-time installation on a mobile device without mobile data is a chore. You have to bring your passwords over somehow from the password manager to connect to the Internet, which you cannot do without the Internet. And no, I'm not typing 32 character passwords one character at a time on a touch screen.

Also, I moved to Germany a couple of weeks ago. On arrival, even after getting a SIM card from Germany, my Google account refused to migrate to Germany. I needed the Deutschland-Ticket app to ride the bus, so I just created a new Google account. I'm pretty sure my Google Play on my phone is in this limbo state where it thinks it's both in Turkey and Germany because I see different prices (Euro or TRY) randomly. It's probably fine.

With the stage set here's what happened:

I had to connect my tablet to eduroam, which has an extremely long password. To bootstrap the tablet, I set up a mobile hotspot from my phone to access my passwords from the tablet. As soon as I connect to the hotspot, the INKredible icon vanishes. I panic and immediately turn off the Wi-Fi. The app is nowhere to be seen;

• It is not under "Installed" tab (Manage apps and device -> Manage)
• It is not under the "Not installed" tab (As above, pick "Not installed")
• I connected the tablet to a PC with a cable to recover my notes at least, there's no trace of INKredible
• It has vanished from the purchase history

The last one was definitely interesting, firstly because it should be right next to Noteshelf, and secondly, how do you manage to expunge something from the purchase history?

After seeing the disappearance from the purchase history, I felt a sort of relief. This is an edge case, a freak accident, a very funny bug. It's like seeing a shooting star. Probably Geoblocking? I have no idea.

Of course, I tried contacting support:

First, an e-mail INKredible support,

Thank you for your feedback. I've checked the Google account '...@gmail.com' and cannot find any purchase under that account. Do you happen to remember which account you have used to purchase the INKredible PRO?

• If YES, you need to log in with that account using the Play Store app. So you could download it for FREE.
• If you are in doubt, please feel free to share those emails with us and I can use the Tool (provided by Google) to check your purchasing.

Then, Google;

I wasn't really expecting this to be solved, what's gone is gone and this is now a story about the importance of backups.

Update

After some back and forth with the INKredible support, they gave me a promo code to download INKredible Pro for free. My notes are still missing, but good backup hygiene is something you have to learn once, fingers crossed.