Yes, I feel the same. A rock solid app dismantled by just one developer choice. Still I won't diss the devs because it's their choice but "a text note" is the last thing I would want "locked" in a sqlite db and bear is a "plain text note taking app" really. So just sad.

Is SQLite really "locked in"?

It's possible most ubiquitous open source software ever (far more common than markdown) and your notes exist in fully readable text form inside it

Bear being proprietary is the real threat of lock in

From memory the sqlite3 API is something like

    sqlite3 data.db 'select text from notes'

I use sqlite3 to load and query random CSVs all the time. It feels a bit weird to hear data described as "locked" within a SQLite DB, because it's one of the simplest non-text formats for me to read data from. It would surprise me of it took more than five minutes to set up a one-way cron job to dump your notes into plain text files.

I don't even use Bear app, I'm just confused by the idea that anything's "locked" inside sqlite when I deliberately put data there for ease of use.

I don't want you to do anything. Use whatever you want! But if you love your tool except for the fact it uses an open database format instead of text files, then lucky you, there's a solution, and it takes all of five minutes.