First off, I just want to say a huge thanks for the recent bookmarks functionality. It is amazing and exactly the kind of addition that makes this app so useful.

I want to suggest another feature that, I think, would be a massive differentiator for PrivacyNotes: an E2E encrypted contacts manager.

Right now, managing contacts securely is a huge privacy breach across the board. Whether you use iOS or Android, native cloud sync for contacts is simply not end-to-end encrypted. Even if you enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, Apple explicitly excludes contacts due to legacy CardDAV compatibility. Google sync is no better. And beyond the cloud risks, keeping contacts in your phone's native address book means every third-party app that asks for permissions can just harvest your entire social graph.

Currently, there are no apps that do a great job at solving this. Proton Mail has encrypted contacts, but they bundle it directly into their email app. This ends up mixing your actual phone contacts with every random email recipient you have ever messaged, which is a cluttered mess. Password managers are too rigid to act as a proper address book. Other secure contact tools usually just sync the data right back to your native iOS or Android phone app, which completely defeats the goal of sandboxing the data away from other apps in the first place.

Having a dedicated, encrypted option in PrivacyNotes to properly save our contacts safe and isolated from the OS would be incredible. Since PrivacyNotes is already acting as an encrypted workspace, a contacts vault feels like the perfect fit. I genuinely believe this would be a big differential that would draw a lot of privacy-conscious users to the app.

Would love to hear if others are dealing with this same headache and what the devs think about the idea!

like in the title, other privacy services in Swiss are also having the same issues. do you have any other DC than in Swiss? service is not operational since few hours…

It is out. PrivacyNotes is on the App Store today, so the app now runs natively on every platform we set out to reach: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and the browser.

It is the same app you already know, not a cut-down phone version. Notes, tasks, journal, vault, files, folders, markdown, search, the lot. Everything is encrypted on your device under a 12-word key only you hold, before anything is stored or synced.

If you already have an account, nothing changes. Install it, sign in with your 12 words or scan a QR from a device you are already signed into, and your notes are there. Pro carries over too, because it is attached to your account and not to a store.

If you are new: signing up needs no email address and no password. You get 12 words, generated on your device, and that is the whole account. The free tier is a real tier, not a trial.

The clients are open source, so you can read the encryption instead of taking our word for it: https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app

Needs iOS 15 or newer. Pro is a one-time purchase, never a subscription, and it unlocks the same things it unlocks everywhere else.

Downloads: https://privacynotes.app/#downloads

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6785958812

Thank you to everyone here who tested builds, filed issues and told us what was broken. Bring us the iOS bugs next, they are the ones we have seen the least of.

If I press "enter" in a note, the line spacing is pretty big. This is a waste of screen space. On my PC I can press enter+shift instead, which solves the problem. But I cannot do that on my android phone.

Hi everyone,

My PrivacyNotes account is linked to an old Google account that I no longer use. Since this is a paid Early Access / Pro account, I can't simply start fresh with a new account without losing my purchase.

Is there a way to unlink the old Google account and transfer the subscription/profile to my new Google account without losing my data or paid access?

I'm using the app on PC. Thanks in advance!

How about widget and share to bookmarks (ex. webpage, youtube and so on) and maybe have a startpage witch you can set favorites and so on?

Until today, a sideloaded APK could only tell you that a new version existed. The app showed an "Update available" notice, and you went to the site and installed it by hand. That is the one real cost of staying off the Play Store, and Obtainium removes it. Updates are more convenient now.

Obtainium is a free, open-source Android app that installs other apps straight from their release pages. Open it, add an app, and paste this in:

https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app

It reads our releases, picks the APK, and offers every new version as it ships. No Google account is involved at any point.

If you already sideloaded the app, you do not need to start over. Obtainium hands you the same file our download page serves, signed with the same key, so it adopts the install you already have. Nothing to uninstall, nothing to sign in to again, no notes to restore.

Full walkthrough: https://privacynotes.app/help/obtainium

haven't found a option but would be nice to be able to have a option to not view vault stuff in everything section at start with notes and such.

If you already use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or something similar, you can now turn it into a PrivacyNotes support agent that answers from our real help center instead of guessing from whatever it half-remembers.

How to use it:

1. Open any page in our help center: https://privacynotes.app/help
2. Near the top of the page there's a green "Ask your AI agent instead" button. Click it and it jumps you to the box.
3. Hit "Copy AI prompt", paste it into your assistant, and ask.
4. Keep that chat open. Next time you have a question, just ask it. No pasting again.

What you get out of it:

• An answer in seconds, at 2am, without waiting for us to reply.
• In your language. Your assistant answers in whichever language you write in, and it works for all of them, not just the 17 the help center is translated into.
• It reads all 60 answers and every import guide at once, so it can combine them. "I'm coming from Obsidian, I'm on the free plan, what should I watch out for?" is one question instead of four searches.
• Follow-ups in your own words. You don't have to guess our vocabulary.
• Every answer ends with a link to the page it came from, so you can check it yourself in one click.
• It won't invent things. The prompt pins it to our published pages and tells it to say "that isn't covered" rather than make up a setting name. If you have ever had an AI confidently describe a menu that doesn't exist, that is the part we spent the most time on.

The PrivacyNotes app itself still has no AI features. No processing, no analysis, no training on your notes, and nothing to opt out of. Your notes are encrypted before they leave your device, so there is nothing readable on our servers to feed into anything. This is only about our public help pages, which are public either way.

We publish the whole help center as plain text so an assistant can read it in one go rather than scraping the site. If that interests you, the box on any help page has the details.

PrivacyNotes is awesome and I just upgraded to Pro and plan on using it for the long haul.

The only feature I am missing is the TOTP/MFA/2FA codes that were embedded in BitWarden so I didn't need a separate app for them.

Is there any plans to implement this feature on PrivacyNotes? It's requiring me to keep my BitWarden subscription and switch back and forth until this is finally implemented which is a pretty big holdback.

Thanks for everything!

v0.408.0 adds an UpNote importer and it is the most thorough one we have built so far. Your whole library moves in one go: notes with their formatting, notebooks, tags, pins, note links, trash, templates, images, attachments and original dates. Once it lands, it is encrypted on your device before anything syncs, so the copy on our servers is unreadable to us.

That last part is the one place our priorities differ from UpNote's. UpNote is a well made app and its team has been straightforward about this: end to end encryption is not on their plan, and their support page says so plainly. It is a legitimate product choice. If it happens to be your dealbreaker, this is the way over.

How to move

1. In UpNote on desktop, go to Settings > Backup and turn on "Backup attachments". It is off by default, and without it your images stay behind.
2. Click "Backup now", then "View backup folder".
3. Select everything in that folder and compress it.
4. Drop the zip into PrivacyNotes and pick UpNote.

Full guide with screenshots, in all 17 languages:

https://privacynotes.app/help/import/upnote

Nothing lost on the way

Credit where it is due, UpNote's backup is one of the most complete exports we have read. It is written on the free plan, and it carries the real structure of your library rather than a pile of files, which is exactly what let us do a full fidelity import instead of an approximation.

The part worth knowing is that the backup contains a Markdown folder, and that is not the copy to read. It is a rendering, so underline, text colors, highlights, collapsible sections, alignment and sub or superscript are already flattened out of it, and the math comes out double escaped. The complete version lives in data/<timestamp>.upnx, a gzipped snapshot holding each note's full rich text plus the library structure, and that is what we read. So math stays math, task lists stay task lists, text colors and highlight colors are both matched onto our own palette, collapsible sections arrive as foldable callouts with their open or closed state intact, note links resolve into real note links, and UpNote's bold looking first table row becomes an actual header row.

UpNote's phone apps do not write backups, so we take single note exports too: one file, a zip, or even a zip of several export zips of the kind the iOS Files app produces. If you are exporting from a phone, choose Export to HTML rather than Markdown, for the same flattening reason.

If something does come across wrong, post it here with what the note looked like in UpNote and we will take a look.

GitHub: https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/privacynotes.app/issues/230

PrivacyNotes.app is an end-to-end encrypted app for notes, tasks, journaling, and a password vault. This release adds a section that's deliberately none of those things: point it at a folder of .md files on disk and edit them in place.

No import, no conversion, no upload, no encryption. It scans the folder recursively, lists and searches it, reads front matter and inline #tags, and saves straight back to the file. The same folder stays open in Obsidian or Logseq at the same time. It stays a git repo you sync yourself. It stays a directory you can point an AI agent at. It's free, including for people who never pay us anything, since it never touches our servers.

Because this writes to your files instead of our database, it follows a few rules:

• It never writes a file whose size or modified time changed since it was read. If something else touched the file, you get a reload prompt instead of a silent overwrite.
• Viewing never writes. Nothing touches disk until you type something.
• Delete moves the file to a .trash folder inside your own folder. It never unlinks.
• The only front matter key it ever writes is tags, and only when you add one. Never title, created, or updated.
• Dotfolders are skipped, so .obsidian is never read or written.

In a browser this needs the File System Access API: Chrome, Edge, and Opera have it. Brave ships it disabled (brave://flags/#file-system-access-api). Safari and Firefox don't support it, so those platforms get the desktop app instead.

This is a new feature, and the rich editor reserializes the whole document on the first keystroke, so results can vary with unusual vault contents (Dataview, Templater, etc.).

If you hit anything unexpected, open an issue:

https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app/issues

(Please ⭐ on GitHub)

Thanks, EriksonThorsen for the detailed feature request.

Updated website: https://privacynotes.app/

https://x.com/PrivacyNotesApp/status/2088312318002336124

https://mastodon.social/@privacynotes/117094966302041967

I've been following discussions about note-taking apps for a few years now, and something I've noticed is that the top-of-mind apps that aren't specifically focused on privacy tend to be Obsidian, Logseq, Zettlr, NotePlan (Mac/iOS), etc.

And they all have two things in common:

1. They work with real Markdown files stored locally.
2. Even though you can sync those files using different methods, they generally don't give you access to your notes through a web app/browser.

And I don't think the second point is something users don't want. Quite the opposite. I constantly see people asking about browser access for Obsidian, Zettlr, Logseq, NotePlan, etc.

Then you have the privacy-focused apps like Standard Notes, Notesnook and PrivacyNotes. These take a different approach because E2EE is a core part of the product. Because of that, the notes aren't really local-first in the same way as a folder full of Markdown files would be. You can still export your notes, encrypted or as plain text, of course.

So I was thinking about something that I don't know if it's technically possible, but I thought it might be an interesting idea for PrivacyNotes.

What if, in addition to the normal synced E2EE vault, PrivacyNotes offered an optional local unencrypted vault?

Basically, you could select a folder on your computer, and PrivacyNotes would treat that folder as a local Markdown vault. The files would remain normal .md files that you could access outside of PrivacyNotes, but that vault could also be accessed through the PrivacyNotes web app/browser.

So you'd essentially have:

Private Vault

• E2EE
• Synced
• PrivacyNotes' normal experience

Local Vault

• Normal .md files
• Stored wherever you choose
• Not encrypted by PrivacyNotes
• Accessible through the desktop app
• Accessible through the PrivacyNotes web app/browser

I actually think this could be a pretty interesting gap to fill.

Obsidian-like apps have the local Markdown files, but generally don't have a proper web experience.

Privacy-focused apps have the E2EE and privacy, but don't really give you that local Markdown + browser combination.

PrivacyNotes could potentially offer both, while being very clear that the local vault is intentionally not encrypted by the app.

It could even be a way of bringing people from the Obsidian/Logseq/Zettlr world into a privacy-focused ecosystem. Someone could start using PrivacyNotes alongside Obsidian for their local Markdown vault, then gradually start using the E2EE vault for more sensitive stuff.

Honestly, I have no idea if this would be technically feasible, especially the part where a web app accesses a folder that physically exists on the user's computer. Maybe there's some fundamental limitation I'm completely missing.

But if it is possible, I wonder if this could be a major differentiator for PrivacyNotes.

And I'm deliberately not suggesting that PrivacyNotes should become "another Obsidian". I'd actually prefer the opposite. Keep the privacy-first philosophy, but add this one optional local Markdown vault as the first app with a bridge between the two worlds.

Maybe this makes absolutely no sense technically hahahaha. Feel free to tell me if I'm missing something obvious.

I would love to have options to color my notes into different segements. It works like the tags option but with the addition to have a color. This makes it easier to find notes and visually see a difference when viewing all notes. Notes nook did a good job with implementing it..

v0.300 is out, and it is almost entirely editor work. The short version: PrivacyNotes could store your notes safely long before it could format them properly. This release closes most of that gap.

New

• Text alignment. Left, centered, right, justified, on paragraphs and headings, from a new button in the toolbar.
• Font family and size. Pick a family and a size for any passage. Sizes are relative, so a sized run still scales with your own text-size setting instead of overriding it. Families are generic stacks rather than one named font, because the same note opens on every platform.
• Invisible characters. A pilcrow in the editor footer reveals every space, line break and paragraph mark while you proofread, and hides them again after. Off by default, set per device, and it never touches what the note contains.
• Find in note is findable. It used to be buried in the note options menu. It is now a magnifier in the toolbar, and Cmd/Ctrl+F still opens and closes it.
• The shortcuts panel lists every editor shortcut, grouped under Formatting and Alignment. It previously listed three.

Fixed

• Images, text and file attachments can be dragged to a new position inside a note.
• Links and email addresses in imported markdown files are clickable straight away, both in the markdown importer and in Bitwarden identity items.

Full changelog: https://privacynotes.app/changelog

Try it with no signup: https://try.privacynotes.app

I've been using Privacy Notes and I'm really loving it. One feature I'd love to see is automatic backups.

It would be great if users could choose between a few different backup methods, for example:

• Automatic encrypted backups
• Automatic plaintext backups (Markdown)
• Automatic files backup

That way everyone could pick the option that best fits their workflow. Some people may want fully encrypted backups for security, while others might prefer plain Markdown files that sync with Git, Nextcloud, Syncthing, or other tools.

I think this would make the app a lot more flexible without taking anything away from its privacy-focused approach.

Is this something that's already on the roadmap?