We are very excited to announce the official release of EteSync 2.0!

This would not have been possible without the hundreds of testers that helped us make sure everything is solid! So thank you all!

If you already know what EteSync 2.0 is and just want to upgrade your account, please refer the EteSync 2.0 migration guide.

As we said in the post announcing EteSync 2.0, time flies. We still can't believe it has already been three and a half years since EteSync was first released. It started out as a simple end-to-end encrypted sync solution for Android. We have since added support for sharing data with other users, and we now have clients for the desktop (DAV bridge), the web, and iOS, built-in support in and Tasks.org, and there are add-ons being built for GNOME, KDE and Thunderbird.

What is EteSync 2.0?

EteSync uses the EteSync protocol (now Etebase protocol) behind the scenes to power all of the apps. While the existing protocol has served us well, it limited our progress and prevented us from achieving some of the things we would like to achieve for EteSync, so after three and a half years, it's finally time for a major protocol upgrade.

EteSync 2.0 is a great improvement over the 1.0 version, while still maintainig everyone's favourite features and capabilities, including, end-to-end encryption, sharing and a full version history. However, since so much has changed under the hood, EteSync 2.0 and 1.0 are incompatible, and you need to migrate your account to 2.0 in order to start using it.

What does it mean for you?

It means we are finally be able to offer some long awaited and often requested features such as notes synchronization and secure location sharing. It means that your sync is faster. It means the EteSync applications are simpler to develop, which means they are easier to improve. We are already seeing these benefits in all of the apps, which already work much better, and helped us reduce large amounts of code.

In addition, there are a lot of user-facing improvements and changes, including:

1. EteSync 2.0 uses usernames for identification (rather than emails previously), so you will need to choose a new username. Usernames should be at least 6 characters long. Shorter usernames will probably be allowed in the future. Changing your email and username will both be possible later on.
2. EteSync 2.0 has just one password that's used for both the encryption, and the login. It uses a zero-knowledge proof to authenticate to the server making sure your password never leaves your device. This makes it more secure than before but much easier to use. Please make sure to keep it safe and don't lose it, as without it you won't be able to access your data!
3. The change log (previously change journal) used to show all of the changes in one long list. Changes are now grouped per item with only the latest changed shown. To show previous changes you need to click on an item and check the past revisions.
4. Invitations UI is a bit different, and there's now a special page for accepting or rejecting invitations, and it's now also easier to leave collections you've been invited to.
5. "Journal" has now been renamed to "Collection", which is a more accurate term and people find it less confusing.
6. You can now easily change your account's email address directly from the dashboard.

What's next

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest benefit of changing to EteSync 2.0 is not how it improves things, but rather what it enables us to do next!

Thanks to EteSync 2.0 we were already able to release EteSync Notes. Additionally, as we said in the previous post, we aren't ready to get into details just yet, but we plan on bringing in some long-awaited features such as secure location sharing. Expect a few more announcements in the coming month or two which will make EteSync a more complete solution for your data syncing needs!

We also plan on formally verifying the protocol using Verifpal and releasing a formal spec to make it easier for other developers to examine, use and improve it, and potentially making it into a standard.

Upgrade to EteSync 2.0

Upgrading to EteSync 2.0 is very easy. First thing to do is to make sure you've update all of your apps to their latest versions.

As we said above, EteSync 2.0 accounts are incompatible with EteSync 1.0 accounts, so a new account needs to be created. However, the billing for both is linked. The migration tool automatically takes care of linking the billing, so you don't need to worry about that.

For step-by-step instructions please refer to the EteSync 2.0 migration guide.

Developers: easily build end-to-end encrypted applications

Over the years many developers have reached out to us about adding end-to-end encryption to their applications. Building end-to-end encrypted applications is both hard to get right, and very time consuming, so using an existing solution makes a lot of sense, especially since EteSync is versatile and isn't limited to contacts, calendars, tasks and notes.

We are now also ready for developers. For more information, please take a look at the developer homepage (Etebase).

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

The work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or  are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

We are happy to announce the first version of EteSync Notes! 🎉🎉🎉

IMPORTANT: EteSync Notes requires an EteSync 2.0 account.

EteSync Notes is the first new app to use the EteSync 2.0 protocol. As we mentioned in a previous post, a big part of the motivation behind EteSync 2.0 is what it enables for the future of EteSync. EteSync Notes is the first fruit of that effort.

Getting started

EteSync Notes depends on the EteSync 2.0 protocol, as such, it requires an EteSync 2.0 account. EteSync 2.0 is still in beta, though it has been tested by many users over the last month and it's been working very well.

To get an EteSync 2.0 beta account, please refer to the beta announcement post.

Once you've migrated your account to EteSync 2.0 (or signed up for a new one), you can start using the notes app!

You can get it from:

• Google Play
• iOS App Store
• F-Droid
• Web client
• Source Code

What's next for EteSync Notes

While this is only the first release, it's already quite stable and feature complete (even includes a dark theme!). With that being said, we are aware that some features are missing, and that there may be some issues. So please, report issues as you find them.

There are a few things missing that we are aware of and plan on addressing soon, namely:

• Labels (tags) for organising the notes.
• File and image attachments.
• Improved markdown support (e.g. checkboxes).
• A rich text editor
• Improve the look and feel of the web client
• Show the revision history per note

Please open a ticket if we missed anything important.

A quick tour

EteSync notes uses Markdown for note formatting. Markdown is a rich formatting language that is easy to write by hand (cheatsheet). In the future we will have a nicer rich text editor that lets you editor Markdown files using the GUI, but until then, you can just use Markdown.

Like all EteSync apps, EteSync Notes support securely sharing notes between users. In order to share a note you need to create a new notebook and share that notebook with other users. After you do that, all the notes in that notebook will be encrypted and shared automatically.

The EteSync Notes app uses the same concepts you are already familiar with from EteSync. This includes a full change history for all of your notes! The change history is not currently visible in the app, but it's all kept behind the scenes.

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

EteSync Notes is based on EteSync 2.0, and the work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or  are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

When you first login into your account, the different EteSync apps automatically create a few default collections for you to use. One for calendar, one for contacts and one for tasks.

Until very recently, the default name for each of these collections was "Default". Many users found it confusing over the years, though we never got around to fixing it. This has finally changed thanks to a user that reminded us of how confusing it is. We rely on your feedback to make the service better, so please, keep it coming!

The name names for the collections are now as follows: "My Calendar", "My Contacts", and "My Tasks". This is how it looked before vs now:

Do you have anything else you think we should improve? Or do you think the naming is not great? Please let us know!

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or  are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

We have just released a new version of the iOS client to the app store. The new version is significantly faster than the previous one, more flexible, includes many fixes (thanks to all the testers!) and now supports syncing your address books in addition to the previously supported calendars and reminders. Go ahead and install it now!

Before we go to any more details about the iOS app, we would like to let you know that some of us from the EteSync community will be attending FOSDEM again this year (1st and 2nd of February). Drop by our IRC channel and let us know if you are attending too, would be great to meet more people from the community.

Oh and in case you missed it, we are now also on reddit, come and join the community there!

Here are the highlights of the most recent improvements to the iOS app.

Address book sync and choosing sync accounts

One of the most significant changes in this version is the ability to sync your address books in addition to the previously supported calendars and reminders! This is made possible thanks to a related feature: you can now choose what local account to sync EteSync with.

To understand what the above means exactly, we need to share a bit of background about how sync works on iOS.

Due to iOS limitations, EteSync can't create new accounts on the device and can only sync to existing ones. This means that in order to sync EteSync with your device you need to choose a local account to sync with. This is not that much of an issue with calendars (for which we have a workaround), but it comes with some implications for address book sync. If you would like to know more, you should read about it in the EteSync iOS user guide.

Significant performance boosts and bug fixes

The iOS app now syncs significantly faster than before! The iOS client is mostly written using a technology called React Native which both decreases development time, and the amount of new code we have to write (due to code reuse with the web client). Unfortunately, due to iOS limitations (no JIT for JavaScript), it came with a significant performance impact. We therefore worked hard on reimplementing a lot of the logic in Swift (which doesn't suffer from the same limitations) which provided us with significant performance boost, at the cost of flexibility and code reuse.

In addition, thanks to a lot of useful feedback from everyone who has been testing the app, we fixed many bugs that we weren't able to catch in our internal testing. Thanks a lot everyone!

Limitations and missing features

As mentioned above, the app now supports syncing your contacts, calendars and tasks, though it's still missing some features. These features are a bit more problematic because of more iOS limitations, but we are actively working on them, and we have some good ideas on how to solve them!

1. Automatic background sync: the sync is still semi-manual. You need to manually open the app and click "sync" in order to push your local changes to the EteSync server.
2. The contact notes field is not currently supported. This is unfortunately another iOS limitation. We have asked Apple for the required exceptions to be able to do this, and are still waiting for their response.
3. While complex event recurrence rules are now supported, there's one more niche aspect that isn't, and that's what's called "exception dates". It's when you have a recurring event with some of its instances are different than the rest of the series.

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

We would also like to remind you that the iOS client is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme. For more information please read the original announcement post.

Feedback, suggestions and contributions

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

In addition, your contributions are always welcome! Be it testing, design, code or helping us spread the word! Every bit helps in making EteSync better for everyone. If you are interested in contributing and don't  know where to start, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Until next time!

We are very happy to announce that the long-awaited EteSync iOS client is now available on the App Store! Go ahead to the setup instructions and start using it now!

It has been over two months since we released the first iOS alpha version and a lot has changed since. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the beta testers for their patience and invaluable feedback. This would not have been possible without your help!

The app is now ready for everyday use, though the work is not over. There are still a few missing features (e.g. address book sync), and there may still be some bugs lurking around. Please let us know if you notice anything wrong.

Upgrading from the beta Expo app

Before you can install the new EteSync app from the app store, you would first need logout from the EteSync Expo app. In order to do so, just open the previous EteSync Expo app, open the side menu, and click logout. That's it. You can now login from the new EteSync app.

What can you do to help?

The best thing you can do to help is to start using the app and report issues as you experience them. We are very responsive and will fix issues very quickly. Please keep in mind that since we don't track our users, we can't know about issues unless you report them. So please report issues to get them fixed.

You can also help us spread the words about EteSync in general, and the new iOS app specifically. The more people use the apps the easier it is for us to find and fix bugs, and the better the service becomes.

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

We would also like to remind you that the iOS client is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme. For more information please read the original announcement post.

We would like to thank everyone who took the time to complete our anonymous survey in August. We gained some interesting insights, some of which we've already acted upon. Thanks a lot for your help with making EteSync better!

Now, let's jump to the updates.

iOS update

We made quite a bit of progress since last month's update and initial alpha release. The app is now faster and looks better; you can now edit and create new collections (e.g. calendars) and share them with other EteSync users; and a few other fixes and improvements.

However, the biggest improvement is that collections are no longer read-only, so any changes you make to your events and tasks on iOS will now be synced to your other clients!

For more information on how to try it out, please head to the iOS app's README. Please let us know if you encounter any bugs or issues.

Issue with disappearing tasks and events on Android

A few users have reported that some of their tasks and and events were no longer showing on their device's calendars, but were still showing in the change journal and other clients. Thanks to a detailed bug report and following feedback, we managed to find out that the issue is indeed real and was a regression in 1.9.0. The issue was fixed in 1.9.3 so please update to that in order to make sure you don't get hit by this issue.

If you're one of the unlucky ones who've been affected by this issue, a quick fix would be to open the EteSync app, remove your account, and then add it back. That's it, all of your events should now reappear in the Android calendar.

New payment methods

While the only automatic payment method is cards, we can manually  process some other ones. For a long time we only supported PayPal and cryptocurrencies as alternative payment method, but we are glad to announce that following your feedback we finally support SEPA bank transfers! This means you can now pay with a simple bank transfer as long as you have a bank account from within the EU. For more information visit the FAQ entry.

Are you outside of the EU and would like to pay using bank transfers? Do we not support your favourite payment method? You'd like us to automate your favourite payment method? Please let us know!

Feedback, suggestions and contributions

As usual, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you that we want to hear your thoughts. Do you have some suggestions or experiencing an issue? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

In addition, your contributions are always welcome! Be it testing, design, code or helping us spread the word! Every bit helps in making EteSync better for everyone. If you are interested in contributing and don't know where to start, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Until next time!

We are very happy to announce the first release of the EteSync iOS client! Yes, that's right, you can now use EteSync on iOS!

Can't wait? Head over to the README for more information and how to try it out.

Current Status

Please note, that while this release already makes it possible to use EteSync on iOS, the app is far from complete and is under heavy development. You should expect bugs, stub UI elements (buttons that don't work), slow operation and many other woes. With that being said, due to the way EteSync works, there is no risk of data loss!

The iOS app is constantly improving, for an up-to-date status, please refer to the README.

What can you do with this version?

1. Setup an EteSync account.
2. Sync the data from your EteSync account to your device.
3. Sync calendar events and reminders to the system so they can be viewed by any app on the system that has access, such as Calendar and Reminder.
4. View the change log for all the journals (collections).
5. Edit journal (collection) names and descriptions.

What's missing or less than optimal?

1. Sync changes from your device back to EteSync, only "pulling" changes is currently implemented.
2. Sync is manual. It only syncs when you open the app and when you manually click the sync button. Need to make it automatic and in the background.
3. A lot of the UI buttons are just stubs that don't work.
4. Syncing your address book - pending on an Expo release that includes this PR.
5. The app is very slow - this will drastically improve soon.
6. The setup is a bit clunky and requires a manual step.
7. Graceful error handling - the app currently assumes all operations succeed.
8. The UI needs a bit of design touch-ups.
9. Release the app on the App Store.

We are making progress every day, and these issues will all be solved soon.

What's next?

As I said above, we are making progress on a daily basis and we plan on releasing a fairly complete version within the next few weeks, proabably before.

Our main short-term goals are:

1. Implementing sync "push" - syncing changes from your device back to EteSync.
2. Implementing address book sync: mostly there, though unfortunately pending on a fix in Expo, so it may take a bit of time until this is enabled.
3. Fixing the aforementioned performance issues.
4. Implement journal (collection) creation and deletion.

What can you do to help?

The best thing you can do to help is to start using the app and report issues as you experience them. No need to report the issues outlined above or missing features, as we already know about those. Please only report actual bugs, like for example, a certain event not syncing, or event titles showing incorrectly.

You can also help us spread the words about EteSync in general, and the new iOS app specifically. The more people use the apps the easier it is for us to find and fix bugs.

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

We would also like to remind you that the iOS client is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme. For more information please read the original announcement post.