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Notes seems to work well for syncing my own notes with myself between my iPhone and my Mac. But when I go to do something simple with someone else, like sharing a shopping list with my wife, it breaks.

On the iPhone, I can share Notes folders with my wife. If I do that, she can see them on her phone and I can see them on mine. But the instant I share the folder with her, even if she hasn't gotten the notification or opened it, it disappears from my Mac and from iCloud. It reappears if I turn off sharing.

On the Mac, I cannot share folders, I can only share individual Notes. Could this disconnect between the two flavors of Notes.app be part of the problem? Do they have different DOMs?

The Sharing function on this app appears to be a total kludge. The best advice I've gotten from searching this forum is "Sharing doesn't work; don't do it." Is that the best there is?

It works reasonably well for myself, synching between iPhone and Mac nearly simultaneously, so I use it all the time for my personal organization. I even use it for things like having a note open in both devices and dictating on my iPhone and then copy/pasting that text on my Mac (my Mac is really poor at dictation compared to the iPhone). I would like to not have to use a different app for shared notes. That's a very awkward workflow.

Is there a way to get the Sharing function in Notes to work without hiding the notes from myself?

Is there another app where both dictation and synching with my own devices work just as quickly, where sharing with someone else also works?

Thanks.

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    Shared Folders are not supported on iCloud.com. What version of macOS are you using? Sharing works very well when between supported devices - I use it a lot. I believe you need macOS 10.15 or later to see shared folders.
    – Ezekiel
    May 22, 2021 at 18:59
  • Notes, with sharing, has been around for a LONG time, so I'm surprised that such an essential feature demands MacOS 10.15. Unfortunately, I'm staying at 10.14 (Mojave) as long as I can because I have some expensive 32-bit software I don't want to have to replace yet. The funny thing is that I CAN share folders between my iOS Notes and my wife's iOS notes. But we're at latest versions on those devices, which fits with your explanation. That suggests that as soon as I share the folder on iOS, it becomes incompatible with MacOS 10.14 Notes. Oh well ...
    – August
    Jun 7, 2021 at 23:28

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The problem did turn out to be as @Ezekiel suggested. On Mojave I would even get notifications of changes that my wife made to shared notes, but when I clicked the notification, Notes reported that it could not find the selected Note. I could, however, see the shared notes and updated edits on my phone.

The problem has gone away now that I have finally updated my MacOS to Catalina.

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