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Mobile app · Office & notes

Cobalt

Universal offline-first note capture and personal knowledge archive.

  • Free, with trade-offs
  • Android
  • Open source

Overview

Cobalt is a note-taking mobile app, available on Android.

Features described in its F-Droid listing and in its GitHub repository: offline use, text recognition (OCR) and Markdown support.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

Excerpts that establish this information
  • “Universal offline-first note capture and personal knowledge archive” — F-Droid, 10 November 2026
  • “Featuring the 60/120fps Cobalt SideDock , Gemini AI Vision OCR region marking, in-app Chrome Custom Tabs, and zero-telemetry local privacy.” — GitHub, 10 November 2026
  • “Home Screen Widgets: View recent captures or trigger capture actions from your home screen.” — F-Droid, 10 November 2026
  • “Supported Item Types: Links (with metadata previews), Markdown text notes, Photos/Images, Video clips, Code snippets, Audio recordings, and Movies/Anime.” — F-Droid, 10 November 2026
  • “A minimalist, offline-first personal knowledge base and universal capture suite for Android.” — GitHub, 10 November 2026

At a glance

Cobalt is free, with trade-offs: it relies on a non-free online service.

Its licence (AGPL-3.0+) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

Strengths

  • Open source code
  • No advertising
  • Commercial use allowed

Weaknesses

  • Flagged by F-Droid: relies on a non-free online service

Sources and checks

  • Facts collected from F-Droid (credit card, source code, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, ads, commercial use, version) —
  • Last technical check: 6 November 2026
  • Description from F-Droid — F-Droid (citation courte)

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