[earthabbey]

I have a Boox Note I bought in August. I am replying to this thread to clear up some confusion.

Google Play Store
If you already had your Note and you already downloaded apps from the Play Store they will still be there after you upgrade to v2. However... if you factory reset the device your app downloads will of course be deleted as it’s a reset. However here is where people are confused. You no longer have the Play store application on the Note after a reset (you may not have the Play Store app after the software upgrade either or if you do it may not work).

Boox Notes are no longer registered devices with Google so once I factory reset whatever the registration info was, was removed and now that these devices are not approved by Google it will not automatically reregister when booting up fresh after a reset. I wrote a big long reply about this and full disclosure I deleted it because it is irrelevant. I didn't want to keep it here because I felt like that would confuse people. At the time I wrote it I didn't realize it was easy to get Google Play back on the tablet. You can do that by:
1) Go to Settings -> Application -> GSF Register
2) Log into your google account and after logged in there should be a button "Register"
3) After this you should have Google Play Store in your app list.

V2 has an unofficial App Store which is a list of apks hosted online not at the official Play Store. I found several common apps like Dropbox and Pocket in there. Downloading a major app like Pocket from a third party source (like Onyx's unofficial AppStore app) is not a great idea because you don't know if something malicious has been added to the package by whoever uploaded it to the third party app store. However you do not have to use the third party app store because you can register your tablet with Google using the steps above and then have access to the official Google Play store.

----
Notes App
As for updates in the Notes app there is one change which is great and one change which is less great. The new handwriting search feature is really good. I write fairly messily and it finds most of what I search for. The ones it doesn’t find are pretty bad scribbles. I was impressed that it found words which I had drawn over.

One feature has been removed, it is the feature where you could write symbols and words large in the middle of the page and then have what you wrote smoothed out and made smaller and automatically lined up onto the lined paper. I believe it was called "vector writing". That feature was in its infancy, there were some UX issues with it, so I understand why it may have been removed - maybe they judged their time was better spent improving other features. But FYI if you use that feature that it is gone now.

Also if you still had old software where you could only do a stroke eraser in the Notes App I just want to mention that a software update in summer added “regular” eraser which lets you erase parts of a stroke. If that is important to you than v2 of course contains that also.

——
Rolling Back to Old Versions
Last but not least be aware that factory reset does not reset the software. That is what got me into the mess with losing my apps. I wanted to factory reset to the original software because I was curious about the differences, I wanted to test stuff out and then upgrade again but that didn’t work out haha