The Current Bottleneck

Currently, managing a large library across multiple devices introduces a significant friction point: local search indexing.

• The Waiting Game: Opening Goodnotes on a secondary device or setting up a brand-new device requires a lengthy indexing process for all changed or new documents.
• Resource Drain: While downloading the actual PDFs and notes takes time, forcing every individual device to build its own search index from scratch is incredibly inefficient. It consumes massive amounts of battery life and CPU power.
• Screen Time: To make matters worse, the app must remain actively open on the screen until this indexing completes, interrupting the user's workflow.

The Proposed Solution

Instead of local-only indexing, the app should adopt a cloud-synced index cache:

• Pre-Compute on the Active Device: The heavy lifting of building the search index should happen on the device where the pages are actually being created or edited.
• Sync the Cache: This generated search index cache is then synced to the cloud alongside the document data.
• Elegant Conflict Resolution: Just as the app currently handles document editing conflicts, it should elegantly merge or resolve conflicts between different versions of the search index if offline edits occur on multiple devices simultaneously.

Why This Changes Everything

Implementing this doesn't just solve a battery issue; it unlocks entirely new storage management capabilities:

• The "Remove Download" Feature: If the search index is synced independently of the heavy document files, users could search through their entire library to find a specific keyword without needing to have all those gigabytes of files stored locally.
• Storage Optimization: Users could confidently offload older notebooks to the cloud to save local storage, knowing they can still instantly query their contents via the synced index and only download the specific document they need.