nowhearthis wrote:
This is nothing new, but I just thought of it today. It is to stop using your iCloud Notes account and instead use an IMAP email account for Notes, but on all your devices the IMAP email account must be the SAME account (otherwise Notes won't sync to all devices). This will NOT work for a POP email account, it must be an IMAP email account.
This is all fine and good, though many folks already have an IMAP account integrated into their Mac and/or iOS Notes. What you've described is just avoiding the use of iCloud to share notes across devices, and there are other methods to avoid iCloud besides IMAP (such as using a 3rd party notes app like Evernote, Google Keep, etc.)
In my experience, using the Mac or iOS Notes app to integrate notes from other email-based accounts is hit or miss, and the internet is littered with complaints about Gmail or Yahoo notes suddenly disappearing (e.g. look at Virjee's post on page 4). iOS Notes has been very reliable with my work Exchange account, but I avoid other types due to reliability concerns. So at this point I'm using iOS Notes for my Exchange notes, and Evernote for personal notes to share with my wife, and neither of us are using iCloud for notes. I don't like having to use two apps for the same purpose, but I just don't feel I have other options to trust.
There is one more experiment I'd like to try, which I think was hinted at on a previous page in this thread. Set up a 3rd iCloud account, and add it to my iPhone and my wife's iPhone. We each have our own iCloud, so this would be a second iCloud account on both devices. My iCloud account was her 2nd account on her iPhone, and that used to work until we updated Notes to the new format. This likely wouldn't help you since you're still using Mavericks, but I'll give this a shot to see if it syncs between two iPhones, each with their own iCloud accounts and both with an extra shared iCloud account for note-taking.