Notes Tech
Your notes stay in your pocket. Encrypted, and offline.
🇫🇷 Version française
v3.1.1 — October 2026 · Privacy policy · Terms of use · Security
Encrypted Markdown note-taking app for Android, written in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose.
100% local, no Internet permission. Interface in English, French, German, Italian and
Spanish. Per-folder vaults (Argon2id passphrase or Keystore-bound PIN), an app lock with PIN and
strong biometrics, FTS5 full-text search, on-device Whisper voice dictation, [[note]] backlinks,
notes read as cards in their colour, multi-step panic mode.
For thinkers, therapists, students, researchers, writers and journalists who want to take
sensitive or dense notes without them ever leaving their phone.
What sets it apart from Notesnook / Obsidian / Bear / Logseq: no Internet permission — the app is
technically unable to send anything, and you can check that in its manifest.
What's new in 3.1.1
- Fixed: in 3.1.0, a long press inside a note being edited closed the app, so text could not be
pasted, copied or selected from the menu (#36).
What a vault note copies still goes the protected way.
- No more "Translate" in the selection menu. Android added it, and one tap sent the selected text
to another app (Google's, which searched it online). The app now turns Android's text classifier
off; Cut, Copy, Paste and Select all remain.
- Fixed: the Whisper Tiny dictation model could not be imported — the fingerprint the app checks it
against was wrong. Whisper Base, the recommended one, was not affected.
- Support the project: a link in About to the donation page, opened in your browser (the app still
has no Internet permission).
- Legal texts clarified: the liability clause, and what happens to an e-mail you send.
What's new in 3.1.0
- Reading: tapping a note opens it to be read, drawn as a card in its colour — its title, the
rendered text, its date — with an Edit button; the ✓ tick saves and goes back to reading. A blank
note opens to be written.
- Long press on a note: edit, move to trash (with Undo) or delete permanently. A vault note's
actions are offered only once its vault is open.
- Colours: eight pastel colours per note, from the ⋮ menu, shown in the lists. A vault note shows its
colour only while its vault is open; like its tags, the colour is stored outside the vault's own
encryption (in the encrypted database) — the privacy policy says so.
- "+" in a closed vault creates the note once the vault is unlocked.
- One blue for the main buttons; legal pages dated and checked against the code; build toolchain moved
to AGP 9. The database moves to schema 10 (one column added, every note kept).
What's new in 3.0.0
Notes Tech is rewritten in Kotlin. Versions 1.x and 2.x were built with Flutter. The 3.0.0 keeps
your data: installed over a 2.0.x, it opens the same encrypted database and the same vaults —
measured over 2.0.3, 2.0.4 and the published 2.0.9, passphrase and PIN vaults included.
- App lock: a PIN asked when Notes Tech opens, plus fingerprint (or face, where the phone rates
it as strong) if you wish; a relock delay; its content is hidden in the recent-apps screen.
- German, Italian and Spanish, on top of English and French.
- A much smaller app: the arm64 APK is about 8 MB, down from 27 MB.
- Hardening from a full security audit (September 2026):
- closing a vault clears the note open on screen;
- deleted text, and text moved into a vault, is also erased from the search index;
- copying from a vault note goes through the protected clipboard, and the keyboard is asked not
to learn what you type in it;
- other apps' text actions no longer appear in the selection menu, and no emoji font is requested
from Google services;
- a panic wipe that was interrupted completes at the next launch;
- plain-text files left in the cache by 2.x are erased at the first launch.
- Before Android 9, no new PIN vault: Android cannot bind its key to the phone's unlock there.
An existing PIN vault still opens and says so.
⚠️ This update is one-way. Android refuses to reinstall a 2.x over the 3.0.0, and uninstalling
erases your notes along with their key. Export what you want to keep before updating if in doubt.
⚠️ F-Droid and GitHub copies do not update each other: F-Droid signs Notes Tech with its own key.
A copy installed from F-Droid receives the 3.0.0 through F-Droid.
Privacy promise
-
No INTERNET permission. The merged release manifest holds exactly four permissions:
RECORD_AUDIO — asked at run time, only if you turn on dictation;USE_BIOMETRIC and USE_FINGERPRINT — added by AndroidX Biometric for the app lock; granted at
install, they give access to no data;com.filestech.notes_tech.DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION — added by AndroidX,
signature level, internal to the app.
tools/check-manifest-permissions.py checks the merged
manifest, not the source one, which declares INTERNET only to remove it.
-
No account, no sign-up, no tracker, no ads, no telemetry.
-
Open source under Apache 2.0: the whole code can be inspected.
-
allowBackup=false and full dataExtractionRules: nothing leaves through Android backup or a
device-to-device transfer.
-
The Whisper model is imported by you through the system file picker — never bundled, never
downloaded by the app.
Features
Markdown editing
- Create, edit, autosave.
- Reading and writing: a note opens to be read — headings, lists, emphasis and links rendered —,
and Edit writes it. A
[[Title]] link
opens the note it points to; an http, https or mailto link opens in the system app, any
other scheme is ignored. Images are never loaded: their alternative text stands in.
- Pin, favourites, colours, archive, trash (30-day retention), sort order, light / dark / system theme.
Per-folder vaults
- Passphrase mode — Argon2id (64 MiB, t = 3) and AES-256-GCM. The vault key (32 random bytes) is
wrapped by the key derived from the passphrase and stored in the SQLCipher database.
- PIN mode — 4 to 6 digits, lighter Argon2id (32 MiB, t = 2) plus a dedicated Keystore key per
vault; 5 failed attempts wipe the vault key. Requires Android 9 or later.
- Authenticated encryption bound to its context (the folder for the key, the note for the content),
and a constant-time verifier that detects a wrong secret without decrypting the notes.
- Auto-lock when the app goes to the background, and after a delay you choose (5, 15, 30 or 60
minutes, or never; 15 by default).
App lock
- PIN of 4 to 6 digits, verified through Argon2id and a Keystore-held HMAC key; growing delays after
five wrong attempts.
- Optional strong (class 3) biometric unlock, backed by its own Keystore key.
- Relock immediately, or after 15 seconds, 1 minute or 5 minutes in the background.
Search
- Instant FTS5 full-text search (
unicode61 tokenizer, diacritics folded). Deleted text is
erased from the index too (secure-delete).
Whisper voice dictation
- whisper.cpp 1.8.3, compiled into the app from source and run on the device.
- Whisper Base q5_1 (57 MB) or Tiny q5_1 (32 MB), downloaded by your browser from the official source
and imported; checked by SHA-256 before use.
- Recordings are deleted once transcribed.
Backlinks
[[Title]] links with autocompletion, a Mentions / outgoing links panel; dangling links resolve
when the target note appears.
Markdown export
- One note as
.md with a frontmatter readable by Obsidian, Logseq, Bear, Foam or Dendron.
- Everything as a ZIP: one folder per notes folder, plus a README.
Panic mode
- Settings → Panic mode, confirmed by typing the word it asks for (
WIPE in English).
- An ordered sequence, where a failing step does not stop the next ones: secure window, dictation
stopped and forbidden, clipboard cleared, vaults locked, vault PIN keys and app lock keys deleted,
database key destroyed, exports and recordings erased, database header overwritten and files
deleted, voice model, preferences and cache erased. Interrupted, it resumes at the next launch.
Screen protection
- On by default: no screenshots and no preview in the recent-apps screen.
Installation
- Published APK — from GitHub Releases,
the universal APK (
notes-tech-universel-3.1.1.apk, any phone), or the lighter one for your device
(arm64-v8a fits almost every phone since 2016). Check the SHA-256 published in the release notes.
- F-Droid — f-droid.org/packages/com.filestech.notes_tech,
built and signed by F-Droid.
- Local build — next section.
No Play Store: no account is needed to install.
Local build
Requirements: JDK 17, Android SDK 37, NDK 27.0.12077973 and CMake 3.22.1 (pinned in
app/build.gradle.kts). Gradle 9.8.1 comes with the wrapper.
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest lintDebug
./gradlew assembleRelease -Pnotestech.replaceInstalledApp=true
⚠️ Without -Pnotestech.replaceInstalledApp=true, the build is installed beside Notes Tech under
com.filestech.notes_tech.next, with its own empty storage: it cannot see, nor replace, an installed
copy. That is how the port was developed without ever touching real data.
The version lives in version.properties; each ABI split gets
versionCode × 10 + ABI (1 = armeabi-v7a, 2 = arm64-v8a, 3 = x86_64), the scheme F-Droid requires,
and the universal APK versionCode × 10.
Stack
- Kotlin 2.4, Jetpack Compose (Material 3), Hilt, Room on SQLCipher 4.16, DataStore
- Bouncy Castle (Argon2id), Android Keystore, AES-256-GCM from the platform
org.jetbrains:markdown (preview), whisper.cpp through JNI (dictation)- No network library
Third-party components and their licences: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
Targets
- minSdk 24 (Android 7.0), targetSdk 36
- Tested on Samsung Galaxy S9 (Android 10) and S24 FE (Android 16)
How it was built
The port's design notes, decisions, traps and security audit are in docs/ and
audits/, in French — start with docs/README-PORTAGE.md.
License
Apache License 2.0 — see also NOTICE and
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
Files Tech suite
Notes Tech is part of the Files Tech suite of privacy-focused Android
apps:
