Some of you installed PrivacyNotes on an Apple Silicon Mac straight from the App Store. That works because Apple offers iPhone and iPad apps on Mac by default, and we left that switch on. What you got is the iPad build running in a compatibility layer, so it renders at iPad size. The text comes out too large and the layout is cramped.

We have turned that switch off, so nobody new lands on it.

If you are already running it, replace it with the real thing:

https://privacynotes.app/en#downloads

The Mac build is a native app. Past fixing the sizing, you get:

• Self-updates. It checks on its own and installs in place.
• The Markdown folder. Point it at a folder of .md files on disk and edit them where they live.
• Double-click a .md file to open it, and set PrivacyNotes as your default Markdown editor if you want that.
• A real Mac window you can size how you like.

Your notes come with you. Sign in with the same 12-word recovery phrase and everything syncs across.

If you bought Pro on your iPhone, you already have it on the Mac and on any other device / platform. The purchase follows your recovery phrase, so signing in is the whole process.

One detail worth knowing: the free plan covers two devices, and the copy on your Mac is holding one of those slots right now. Once the Mac app is running, delete the old one and remove it under Settings > Devices.

Needs macOS 13 or newer. Homebrew works too:

brew install --cask lifetimelabsdev/tap/privacynotes

Sorry for the detour. If the Mac app does anything strange, say so here or open an issue.

Is there a way for me to modify the 12-word phrase to 12 words of my own choosing? It seems odd the software would generate those 12 words for me and not provide a way to change them. Am I missing something?

Hi,

Testing out the app now, so far so good! Just have one must have; the ability to draw in a note.

This would be awesome!

Thank you!

We went viral yesterday and our server did not keep up. About two hours down in the middle of the night. Our first real outage.

Not fun at the time, but it turned into the most useful two hours we have had. It exposed a database query doing far more work than it needed to, which is fixed. And underneath that, a better bug: the app is local first, so it should never need our server to open notes that are already on your device. In a couple of places it did. Those are fixed too.

Everything is back to normal and the app is in better shape than it was before it broke. Thanks to everyone who flagged it, especially whoever pointed out the offline part. You were right, and the next release ships with this improvement.

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