One iCloud conflict ate a note about a client's campaign structure. I didn't notice for three days.
That's the honest summary of month five with Obsidian on mobile. I run ad ops automation across four clients plus a content side business, so context-switching is the actual job — not a nuisance around it. The pitch for Obsidian mobile was simple: capture anything away from the desk, have it land cleanly in the same vault I work from. What I didn't account for was the sync layer behaving like a silent failure mode.
iCloud creates ghost conflicts roughly once a week for my setup. Obsidian surfaces them as duplicate files with a timestamp suffix — easy to miss if you're not looking. I wrote a Templater script that flags them in a dedicated "conflicts" note, which at least makes them visible. Still manual to resolve, but I see them now. The script doesn't fix the underlying problem; it just means I stop losing things.
The bigger behavioral shift was harder to admit: I had to stop trying to maintain my desktop curation discipline on mobile entirely. No linking, no tagging, no folder placement on the phone. Text goes into the inbox, full stop. Every time I tried to place a note properly during capture, I'd slow down enough that I'd abandon it and text myself instead — which defeated the whole point. It took six weeks of friction before I actually committed to that rule. Now a Dataview query on my daily note template surfaces all inbox files modified in the last 24 hours, and I process them at the desktop every morning in 8–12 minutes. The variance tracks almost entirely to how much I captured the night before, not to processing overhead.
I also tested Obsidian Sync for a month. Conflict handling was marginally better and sync was faster. Didn't matter — the actual bottleneck was never sync speed. The mobile editing experience itself, cursor behavior, keyboard interaction with long markdown files, is genuinely worse than desktop regardless of what's moving files around. Paying more for faster sync doesn't fix that.
I wrote up the full breakdown — including the Dataview query I use for inbox triage and what the 18-month scorecard actually looks like — over on dailyfocusmag.
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