Apps I Use

  • Notes: Standard Notes
    • Used for: 2+ years
    • Review: The app isn’t that good, and it hasn’t been improving that much either, it lacks polish in annoying fundamental ways, like a cursor that disappeared for months, or how it’s just a pain to do a bunch of operations.  But it’s the only thing that is practically E2EE and Open Source. 
    • Replacement Hopes: I was hoping that Bear would have seamless E2E but they made it a pain in the ass, where you have to individually lock each note one by one, in a multi step UI.  Current replacement candidates: DEVONthink, Inkdrop.  See my research article on E2EE notes apps.. Nov 2020: In the end I stuck with standard notes because I don’t use note apps that much and Inkdrop isn’t better enough to switch to.
  • Photos: Mylio
    • Used for: ~6 months
    • Dedicated Article: Mylio Article
    • Review: I really, really like Mylio.  Really good performance, works with all of my devices, does not die on my 90k photo library and the devs talk to you on a community forum.  I just dump photos into it without worry and I don’t run into a single scaling issue like I did with other apps.  They have some cross platform quirks, but unlike standard notes it doesn’t get in the way of the core flow.   They’re a small team although so they can’t do a lot at a time, but they get all the fundamentals right!
  • Chat: Signal
    • Used for: Years
    • Review: It’s good enough, but not as good as iMessage & others.  Ever since they got $50 million in funding although, they’ve been improving a lot more.  I’m looking forward to a future where you don’t need a phone number to use signal.  Maybe a fast native desktop client too?  Or a macOS catalyst / iOS-on-macOS edition of Signal, along with a removal of the device limit and an ability to make other phones ‘slave devices’.   I really respect signal, all of their design decisions is really showing they have tried to figure out security that a normal person can use.
  • iOS Chat: iMessage
    • Used for: Years
    • Review: The quality of the app is better than Signal, it’s on all of your iPhone friend’s phones and it’s way more E2EE than almost everything popular out there other than maybe WhatsApp. It has problems with iCloud backups basically giving apple your message history, but supposedly it’s E2EE if you don’t back up. It’s an OK backup for when your friends won’t use Signal but have an iPhone.
  • Video Calls: Facetime
    • Used for: Years
    • Review: Probably the highest quality video chat app I’ve ever used, and it’s supposedly E2EE. I use Signal Video with the Android friends. Since there is no ‘backing up’ with FaceTime, I feel more comfortable using it.
  • Password Management: 1Password
    • Used for: Years
    • Review: It’s actually a well designed piece of software, probably the best made one in the entire list here other than facetime.  Other password managers are worse from a software maturity & quality standpoint (bitwarden) or other UI & security issues (lastpass). Password managers although are still too hard for my mom to use, it’s even too much of a pain for some of my software engineering friends.  The average person does not like using them.
  • Backups: Arq
    • Used for: Years
    • Review: It has a nice UI, it works with Amazon Drive, it does incremental backups, it’s E2EE. But it’s slow, closed source, eats CPU and at this point I want to find something fast and open source, which will mean I will probably need to stop using amazon drive at some point and get myself a hetzner storage box.

Apps I Tried

  • BitWarden: It’s really cool there is an open source version out there, but it isn’t as good as 1password, and it really is just one guy when I check a year ago.  Dig into the source code and you find some scary shit like no unit tests & javascript put into one code base.  I don’t want to suffer a subtle data wipe bug and not have any of my passwords anymore.