Until now, Google Keep has basically been a dumping ground for your notes, internet finds, and random thoughts. Being a Google product, the app almost exclusively relied on search to help you sift through the pile, but that has finally changed — at least, on Android.
After first appearing for some users last week, Google has now widely rolled out Keep’s new sort button to all Android users. Conspicuously absent in the announcement of this rollout and the feature’s documentation are the iOS, iPadOS, and web versions of Google Keep.
Google blesses Android before iOS for once, but what about the web?
Counterintuitively, Google has a track record of rolling out new features to iOS before its own mobile platform. Chrome’s bottom address bar was infamously available to iPhone users long before officially coming to Android, and Gboard started life as an iOS exclusive even though Android supported third-party keyboards years before Apple added the functionality.
So it’s nice to see Google Keep’s development team think of Android first with this new sort button — but at the same time, it’s a bit perplexing that the feature isn’t at least available on desktop already, considering how much of Keep’s UI is web-based.
As for the button itself, it’s an intuitive experience. You’ll find it in the search bar to the left of the layout icon (pull to refresh if it’s not there yet). Tapping it opens a bottom sheet menu where you can choose between Custom, Date created, and Date modified as sorting options.
Custom is effectively the default, allowing you to long-press and drag notes into any order of your choosing. If you sort by one of the other options, however, the new button will change to indicate that the list is sorted in descending order (newest to oldest). Head back to the same menu and tap either Date created or Date modified again to sort in ascending (oldest to newest) order instead.
Lastly, pinned items will still show up at the top of your list, but notes within this section will also be sorted in the chosen order.
