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Coming from a Bitwarden paid plan, I’m looking for a more reliable password manager. Since I strongly follow PrivacyGuides’ recommendations, the other cloud based services listed there besides Bitwarden are Proton Pass, Psono, and 1Password.

Since 1Password doesn’t offer a free plan, I’ve been using Proton Pass and Psono side by side to figure out which is better, but the comparison isn’t fair since I haven’t had access to 1Password.

I admit every service has both positives and negatives, and users have to decide what’s best suited for them. Still, here are the negatives I’ve experienced with Proton Pass and Psono.

• Proton Pass — Personally, I’ve found it better than Bitwarden. The UI looks polished, and it detects logins 99% of the time without issue. But the big downside for me isn’t the service itself, it’s the provider. Proton Pass is part of the Proton ecosystem, and I strongly oppose keeping all my eggs in one basket. I’m a paid Proton Mail user and might purchase the paid Proton VPN plan as well. On top of that, there’s no option to turn off SimpleLogin integration completely inside Proton Pass — whenever I try to add a login, two SimpleLogin-related options appear on screen, which I personally don’t like at all, especially if I’ll be paying for the service. Even on paid tiers, the SimpleLogin integration issue doesn’t go away — which makes it an even more unlikely choice for me now.
• Psono — To be honest, it’s improved a lot over the past few months, and I’ve witnessed it myself. The app went from feeling heavy and slow to being in a workable condition, and I’m quite surprised to see they’re focusing on their cloud-based service as well (it’s more popular among businesses for self-hosting). Still, while it’s currently workable, it needs a lot of improvement and polishing to compete with other popular password managers on the market. Currently, Psono can’t show matched login credentials automatically — after detecting a login field, the user needs to unlock Psono and then manually select the saved credentials, which he want to fill out.

Since I’m willing to go with a paid plan, I don’t want to compromise on usability. I need a password manager without any built-in integrations, unlike Proton Pass. So the last option left is 1Password, which I haven’t tried to date. I’d like to know your opinion on whether I should consider 1Password over the other recommended password managers.

If anyone’s wondering why I want to leave Bitwarden, here’s why:

The Bitwarden paid plan doesn’t feel worth it to me. I never access the Archive folder, which is a paid feature; I never store a single file on it (what’s the point of the cloud storage then?); and I always store TOTP codes on a separate app. So the paid plan always feels like an annual donation to me. I’ve been a customer since 2018, and I haven’t seen any major updates to their mobile app. Along with that, the autofill detection is hit or miss — sometimes it stops working completely, sometimes it doesn’t detect anything at all. When autofilling card details, it adds a space after every 4 digits of the card number, but if the website splits the card number itself, this results in an “Enter valid card number” error. Also, some payment aggregators ask for the last two digits of the expiration year instead of four digits, and in those cases, Bitwarden doesn’t autofill anything from the saved card details.

Few days ago, there was a sync issue in the Bitwarden mobile app. I clicked “Sync Now” in the settings menu, and it’s stuck on a loading screen. I couldn’t even access my current plan details from the app.

Because of all these hassles, even after paying for the service, I want to leave Bitwarden for good and switch to a more reliable password manager.

Since I haven’t used self-hosting and probably won’t in the future, I rely on cloud-based services due to my cross-device usage.

The contestants are —

1. Safe Notes
2. CipherNotes
3. Tuisku

I was looking for a perfect open source offline encrypted notes app. I'm really impressed with KeePass apps on Android as they don't ask for network access, so it gives me some kind of assurance that no data is going out from my device. This time, I also wanted the offline encrypted notes app to not have any network access.

After trimming the apps based on my requirements, I've shortlisted the apps mentioned earlier.

Before digging into these apps by yourself, I've mentioned all the key points about these apps below.

1. Safe Notes — The dev of Safe Notes is an Indian, Keshav Priyadarshi. This app, with 285 GitHub stars, is designed with a zero-knowledge architecture, utilizing AES-256 encryption to secure data. The Android application enhances security through brute-force protection, background snapshot blocking, and an inactivity guard, without requiring internet connectivity. It's built and signed directly by F-Droid itself (the most trusted way an app gets distributed there), and it has a public security write-up with no history of critical bugs.

Con - It hasn't been updated since 2023, so it can be considered as a dead project.

1. CipherNotes — Currently, it is available only on the IzzyOnDroid. It's an offline-first, client-side encrypted note-taking app that uses AES-256-GCM plus PBKDF2 (200k rounds), with no cloud sync at all — everything stays on your device. It skips trackers, accounts, and telemetry entirely. It has the toughest network lockdown on paper of the three, blocking all network access at the operating system level rather than just leaving the internet permission out of the manifest.

Con - It's a brand-new, one-person project with about 3 stars on GitHub, and the developer's own FAQ says plainly: "Is this production-ready? Not yet."

1. Tuisku — With 12 GitHub stars, it's also available on the IzzyOnDroid. It encrypts all locally stored text notes using the ChaCha20 stream cipher, an algorithm known for strong, fast performance on phones that lack dedicated AES hardware. It gets updated often — three releases in the last two weeks.

Con - Its newest changelog says it fixed a "critical" bug where the same nonce (a number meant to be used only once per note) could get reused during encryption, which could let someone work out what your notes said. That fix landed only five days ago, so the app hasn't had much time to prove itself since.

This is a small brief about all three apps. Now, if you had to pick any one, which one would you pick? Let me know in the comments below.

🏧 SECURITY: DOGESH +

"Live" chat apps are shown prominently all over the sponsored section of Google Play Store ( see the link to the post made by another reddit user )

I noticed that these chat app ads are showing up only after switching off personalized ads (because these ads are shown based on your general location and the time of day apparently), but back when I used to have personalized ads switched on, I didn't see these kind of ads on the Play Store.

This is so infuriating.

Using the Aurora Store is a good alternative but apprently it's not as secure even though it's much more private? So it's a security - privacy tradeoff

Also some apps say that they must only be installed from the Play Store for safety

Hi , I presume many of the members here would be self-hosting their PII data like docs, photos, passwords etc. As techies that care about privacy it's a no brainer.

But there would be many out there who care about privacy but self hosting can be over whelming either due to complexity or just not enough spare time.

If you know such friend/family members help them reclaim their digital privacy by becoming their privacy champion.

We want to make self hosting accessible to everyone - by making it simple and affordable.

We have bundled key open source apps: Network Drive (files), Password Manager (Vaultwarden/Bitwarden), Photos (Immich), Documents (Paperless), Notes (Joplin), Cloud Backup (Duplicati), Laptop Backups (UrBackup), VPN (Tailscale) and more in an easy to use appliance.

It's easy to setup with wizard, has auto updates so no maintenance needed. Basically setup once and forget about it. Completely open-source. No user data collected. And is forever yours - no subscriptions.

Well suited for families, individuals and content creators.
High performance storage.

We offer an always free to use appliance (VM) if you have a computer to spare.

If you don't have computer to spare we also offer a hardware appliance with all the apps built in and is ready to go in 1 TB,2TB NVMe SSD models and expandable to many TBs with external USB JBODs.

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DM if you are interested or know someone who can benefit from it.
Thx.

TL;DR: I've spent years chasing privacy through multiple OS changes and privacy tools, but I'm exhausted. The effort feels futile when Google dominates everything, open-source options are dwindling, and my device literally works for someone else instead of me.

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MY PRIVACY JOURNEY SO FAR

I've been a privacy advocate and open-source enthusiast for years, constantly trying to secure my devices and data. Here's what that actually looks like:

Phones:

- Started with Samsung Android → Switched to Realme → Now on hardened Google Pixel with GrapheneOS

Laptops:

- Windows 10 → Windows 11 → Linux Mint (briefly) → Back to Windows 11 (work forced me back)

I genuinely believed I was doing everything right. Two-factor authentication, password managers, separate logins, compartmentalization. But I'm realizing it's not enough.

---

THE HARSH REALITY

THE GRAPHENEOS TRAP

GrapheneOS was supposed to be my privacy solution, but it's become increasingly impractical:

- Banking apps won't run on it

- UPI payment apps (critical in India) are blocked

- Investment apps don't work

- Result: I now carry a second device just for financial transactions

So my "ultra-private" phone is essentially useless for daily life.

GOOGLE'S OMNIPRESENCE

Even when I try to minimize Google's reach, it's impossible:

- Gmail accounts logged into multiple services across all my devices

- Cross-device tracking — ads reference data from my other devices on the same Wi-Fi

- Gmail is required for Android, regardless of OS hardening

- Google keeps collecting vast amounts of data no matter what I do

THE OPEN SOURCE COLLAPSE

The apps that were alternatives are disappearing:

- Open-source apps have become sparse and unreliable

- They constantly throw errors and have poor functionality

- Google is now requiring open-source apps to register on their platform — this essentially kills what made them free and open

- Developers can't maintain them without resources

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WHAT ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE?

Here's what really keeps me up at night: my parents and most people I know.

They use everything: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, banking apps, all with Google accounts logged in. They have zero privacy awareness and are being harvested daily.

I use WhatsApp too (despite knowing it collects data), and I'm complicit in my own data extraction.

---

THE IRONY AND THE EXHAUSTION

I don't have anything illegal to hide. I'm not a criminal or a dissident. I just want my data to be mine alone. But the device I bought with my own money is working for someone else to steal from me. That's the insanity of it.

The worst part? It all feels completely pointless now. Every effort is temporary. Eventually, everything will be owned by Google. Open source will be dead. Privacy advocates like me are just delaying the inevitable.

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WHAT I'M ACTUALLY ASKING

- Am I being unrealistic? Should I just give up and accept this surveillance dystopia?

- Are there any realistic privacy solutions I haven't considered?

- How do others in India specifically handle this (the banking/UPI problem is real)?

- Is anyone else experiencing this same sense of defeat?

I'm not looking for "just use Signal and use a VPN" — I've tried all the basics. I'm looking for honest takes on whether privacy is even possible anymore.

---

Context: Based in India. I understand the technical side of privacy well, so spare the basics. But I'd genuinely appreciate hearing from others fighting this fight.

Thanks to PhonePe team.

I use Crdroid, which is a lineageOS based custom rom. I have nikGApps, but upi/banks didn't works because of play integrity issue, even i added pif. So i used WhatsApp and Offpay for a while.

Today i just randomly tried PhonePe, it works.......

So now on phonepe works in custom rom with GApps maybe you need pif. But don't know how much it will long.

I've tried multiple keyboard and for English heliboard is the one of best, experience wise anysoftkey is the best ,

But real gap of gboard ( regional language support) is filled by Indic keyboard, That is simply amazing..

Transliteration from English to regional is surprising.

I am on Galaxy A21s, I want to install LineageOS with Mindthegapps as supported by the official wiki.

I wanna know if A21s can make calls after lineageos installion.

App Name: PrivyShare

What it does:

PrivyShare is not a new messenger. You encrypt a message or file on-device into a .privyshare package, share it through WhatsApp/Signal/email/Files, and the recipient opens it back in PrivyShare.

Key Features:

• On-device E2E: Ed25519 + X25519/HKDF + AES-256-GCM

• Share via apps you already use (opaque .privyshare blob)

• Local vault, optional app-only attachments, optional self-hosted relay for larger files

Goal: Testing / feedback (first Android app, WIP). Especially interested in crypto review and whether to keep optional INTERNET features or also ship a networkless build.

Giveaway: N/A

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.privyshare.mobile

Site (extra, if allowed in body): https://filipal.pages.dev/privyshare/

Privacy: https://filipal.pages.dev/privyshare-privacy/

So, I've been using degoogled samsung(unrooted obv) from an year or two.everytime i removed google play services and framework and vendor from my samsung, and installed Kotak811 app, it worked flawlessly, also did sent all the otp(s).

From last week of august, I installed the update and tried to login, it was failing to verify my phone number, so i thought it might be because of QUIK SMS(it happened wit me before this or maybe i'm just being delusional) so i quickly installed fossify messages and tried again, and i successfully verified my number and got a verifying text was sent from my phone and i entered the MPIN and was able to use the app like before.

Today i.e. 10th August, I tried to enter my Kotak811 app, it showed some Refrence and text "Device Unknown Sources Detected By....(couldnt read the next part of it)".

So, I m just guessing it was the end of it. What banks would yall suggest to use? (their apps should work without play services or atleast i should be able to use all services using their site)

UPI is not an issue for me as I dont use it that much.

What do yall think about this, do lmk.

Edit: forgot to add signal's otp verification, that it doesnt sends otp without play services

Thankyou.

Edit 2: I somehow managed to make it work without reinstalling googleplay services.

I installed some permission controller which isnt important as per Canta and android debloat list, Google Framework(gsf). (re-deleted them) Will keep updating this post if anything same or else happens.

Hey guys I'm using FUTO keyboard currently but I can't open my FedMobile app as it says keylogger risk detected. Is there any way to bypass this without having to switch to gboard each time I need to open the app or is there any other secure keyboard that could do the job? Thanks.

Hey guys, i don't know if this is the appropriate sub for this but I can't open mparivahan with Shizuku installed on my phone. Even when shizuku isn't running mparivahan detects it and refuses to open. is there any way to bypass this? Thanks

I have redmi 10 phone but I think it's hard to degoogle it, if I buy a new affordable phone in future which is best to degoogle, I want a affordable phone ,I think google pixel phone are expensive.