The Notion mobile app nobody defends anymore

Hey,

Notion's biggest release since the AI launch dropped this week and most of you missed half of it. Workers. External Agents API. A CLI. An Agent SDK.

All in one Monday keynote. While Notion was rewriting itself into infrastructure, r/Notion spent the week deciding the mobile app is officially unusable. Circle August 11: free Workers become paid Workers, 84 days from today.

Let's get into it.

- Nick

In Today's Email 👀

• Notion 3.5 turns your workspace into a runtime

• The formula trick that kills counter-button page bloat for good

• The August 11 deadline nobody is talking about

• The mobile app pile-on you've been waiting to read

• Two must-watch walkthroughs (Matthias's 3.5 deep dive, Simon's agent-era Life OS rebuild)

3 Tips / Updates

1/ NOTION 3.5 SHIPPED

Monday, May 13. Notion launched the Developer Platform. Workers, database sync, External Agents API, a CLI, and an Agent SDK, all in one keynote. Workers, webhooks, and sync went live the same day. The Agent SDK and External Agents API are on waitlists.

Workers are hosted code that runs on Notion's infrastructure. They fire in three ways: as a tool a Custom Agent can call, via a webhook (any app pings Notion, Notion runs the code, code does the thing), or on a sync schedule. Database sync pulls live data from Salesforce, Zendesk, Postgres, or anything with an API into your Notion databases. The External Agents API lets Claude, Codex, Decagon, or your own agents show up in your Notion sidebar as first-class citizens. Webhooks finally go two-way.

To activate Workers today you need to be a workspace owner on the Business plan or higher. Settings → Workers. Same gate as Notion AI.

The bet is hub and spoke. Your context lives in Notion, and whichever AI is winning this month gets to plug in. Custom Agents for Notion-native work. Claude for code. Codex for whatever. They all read from the same workspace. If that play lands, Make and n8n have a real problem 12 months from now.

Think of one workflow you currently run in Make, n8n, or Zapier that touches Notion. Write down what a Notion Worker version of it would look like (trigger → code → action). Two patterns to anchor on: a "new project type X" worker that auto-creates a standard task checklist from a process database, or a "company added to CRM" worker that fetches the logo and basic firmographics. You don't need to deploy anything. You just need to see one of your existing workflows in the new shape.

2/ FORMULA TRICK: CREATE BUTTON COUNTERS WITHOUT PAGE BLOAT

Every Notion user has built a counter button (habit tracker, workout reps, water intake) that spawns a new page on every click. Stop. There's a one-property way to do it.

If the button lives inside the database it's counting, it's two clicks. Add a Button property, set the action to Edit property → Number → Custom formula prop("Number")+1. Done. Each click increments the count, no new pages.

If the button needs to live outside the database (a dashboard or homepage button), the setup is fiddlier. Define a variable that mentions the target page (type @PageName, click "Edit as formula", and trim the trailing space so it parses as a page reference instead of text). Chain a second variable as Variable 1.prop("Number")+1. Then add an Edit Property action that writes Variable 2 back into Number on Variable 1.

The "Edit as formula and trim the space" step is the one most people miss. Without it the mention stays as text, the formula silently fails, and you'll spend 20 minutes wondering why. If that sounds annoying, watch the 3-minute walkthrough below. Seeing it done once makes the whole thing click.

Pick one habit, workout, or water-intake counter you have in Notion that's currently spawning junk pages. Rebuild it with this pattern. The page count in that database stops growing. You stop archiving 47 sub-pages every Sunday.

3/ THE AUGUST 11 DEADLINE NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT

Buried in the Workers announcement: free beta ends August 11, 2026. After that, Workers run on Notion credits. That's 84 days from today.

Nobody outside Notion knows what the per-execution credit cost will be. Nobody knows whether a Worker that polls every 5 minutes will eat a $20/seat plan's credits in a week. Nobody knows whether the credit math will compete with Cloudflare Workers ($5/mo for 10M requests) or feel like a tax on automation.

Every team that builds production workflows on Workers between now and August 11 is gambling that Notion's credit-pricing will be reasonable. That's a bet, not a plan. Treat the beta as a prototype phase, not a deployment phase. Write your Workers so they can move to a different runtime if the pricing doesn't land where you need it.

Poll / From The Community

Someone called the Notion mobile app "the worst thing to ever exist".

The complaints rolled in fast. Back button that doesn't work. Text lag on a 120Hz screen. Random freezes. Images that refuse to load. Icons that vanish. One person said they restart the app every two minutes and that's not an exaggeration. Another said capturing a quick thought in the mobile app is the fastest way to forget what the thought was.

A few people said they've just given up and use a separate app for mobile entirely, pushing things into Notion later from desktop.

One lone voice said the app works great for them. They got ratioed.

→ Full thread here if you want to commiserate.

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Quick Links & Tools

Matthias Frank's 3.5 walkthrough

Best 32-minute deep dive on Workers, Agent API, and Agent SDK that's out there. 10K views in 5 days. Watch.

Simon Berryman's agent-era Life OS rebuild 

Steal the architecture: one "agent hub" page holding your agent instructions, sub-agents, knowledge, and skills. Bonus: any page can be promoted to an AI skill via Page menu → Use with AI. Watch.