# Cryptee Blog > Official product news and announcements blog of Cryptee — A safe, encrypted place to write personal documents, privately store photos and more. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages _No public content available._ ## Posts ### Open Document Format (ODT) Support URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/open-document-format-odt-support/ Last updated: 2026-08-03T10:59:57.000Z Greetings from sunny Tallinn, Estonia! A small update with one feature we're genuinely excited about. Let's dive right in! **OPENDOCUMENT (ODT) IMPORT & EXPORT** You can now import and export OpenDocument (.odt) files in Cryptee Docs. It's in beta, and you'll find it in the usual import and export menus. ODT is an open, vendor-neutral format. No single company controls it, unlike .docx and Microsoft. Germany now [requires ODF across its public administration](https://itsfoss.com/news/germany-digital-stack-mandate/). As a privacy-first European company, built and headquartered in Estonia, Europe, we take open standards and digital sovereignty very seriously, so we thought it was long overdue we've added support for it. If you use [LibreOffice](https://www.libreoffice.org) or work with European public administrations, your documents now move in and out of Cryptee with no conversion detours. The import/export features are in beta, and we hope to improve these over the course of the next few months. So please reach out and let us know if/when you run into issues and we'll make sure these are fixed. **AND OF COURSE, TONS OF BUG FIXES AND PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS** - Fixed a font bug in EPUB documents. - A bunch of small Paper mode bug fixes and performance improvements. - We think we've fixed issues with the dark mode launch images on iOS. If yours still looks wrong, tell us and we'll take another swing. It's all because of the fruit company folks, they keep breaking things on iOS and we're playing catch up. - Fixed a typo in a video thumbnail parameter. One character. You'd be amazed how much damage one character can do. --- If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy, security and data sovereignty in Europe as much as possible. All the very best from Tallinn, John Ozbay ### End-to-End Encrypted Photo Sharing URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/end-to-end-encrypted-photo-sharing/ Last updated: 2026-03-26T21:07:43.000Z Greetings from Estonia, Europe! We have some big news. After years of careful work, we're ready to share our most anticipated feature to date. ![You can now share your Cryptee Photos albums with others](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2026/02/sharing-with-vivaldi-1728w-1.jpg) ## END-TO-END ENCRYPTED PHOTO SHARING You can now share your encrypted photos and videos with others using a link. All end-to-end encrypted, no AI scanning your photos, no compromises. So why did this take so long? We had the code ready for *years*. But shipping it *responsibly* required a lot more than just writing code. ### WHY WE TOOK OUR TIME Early on, our legal team flagged that encrypted photo & video sharing could come with difficult, costly legal complications and scenarios. Those conversations led us down a path of asking some hard questions about what it means to build sharing tools ***responsibly***. We could have done what's fashionable in Silicon Valley, moved fast and broken things, and broken society slowly, all without thinking twice. You know, the way some companies release AI models that can generate virtually anything with zero safeguards, and then *maybe* bother with the consequences later. That's not how we do things. Instead, we spent the last few years talking to advocacy groups, researchers, sociologists, and other experts across Europe, trying to understand their specific concerns around the spread of illegal visual materials, and what we could do to address them. *Not because anyone forced us to do any of these things, but because we think it matters.* This was especially important to us given the current political climate, where encryption itself is under attack by [lobbyists](https://edri.org/our-work/how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/) and [lawmakers](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/uk-still-trying-backdoor-encryption-apple-users) around the world, often using the very same concerns as justification to strip everyone's privacy. We decided to prove that it's possible to build encrypted sharing tools thoughtfully, without backdoors, without scanning, and crucially *without pretending the concerns don't exist*. ### THE PRACTICALITY SPECTRUM Here's what we learned. The core concern among experts isn't about one person sending one file to one other person. It's about **mass spread**. The keyword is "*scale"*. Think of it as a spectrum. On one end, someone could physically mail a USB stick. Nearly impossible to detect, but wildly impractical at scale. On the other end, someone can upload content to a social platform and share it with millions in a single click. Maximum reach, with zero effort, and [this is sadly the most common way people spread illegal content on the internet](https://www.reuters.com/technology/spain-probe-x-meta-tiktok-over-ai-generated-child-sexual-abuse-material-2026-02-17/). We wanted to build sharing that lives firmly on the impractical-for-abuse side of this spectrum, while still being sufficiently usable for real people with real needs. A family sharing vacation photos and videos. A war photographer getting sensitive footage to a journalist. A client reviewing a wedding album. ### THE GUARDRAILS After long discussions with experts, here's what we came up with to keep things safe, free of spam and sane : - Sharing is only available to paid users - You can only share an album with up to 5 people - Invite links expire after 48 hours (you can always send new ones) - Recipients confirm their email with a one-time token before accepting the invite / accessing the album - You can revoke access to shared albums at any time - Senders can always see the email addresses of recipients who accepted invites, so you know exactly who has access - Senders can optionally share the encryption key separately from the invite link for an extra layer of control All your photos, videos and albums remain end-to-end encrypted. We cannot see their contents, and no one else can either. There is no scanning. There is no way for us or anyone to see what's inside unless you give them access. We believe these limits still cover everything you'd actually want to do. Share with your family, your friends, your colleagues, your clients. One click, and it just works. At the same time, these limits make it impractical for bad actors to spread illegal content or spam people at scale. But if you run into a scenario we haven't thought of, we're all ears, [shoot us a message](https://crypt.ee/help). --- ## WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE ### SENDING All you have to do is tap the "share" button, and Cryptee will generate a sharing link for you. Want more control? You can dial in the settings further. Share only your favorite photos from an album. Or share only the preview-sized versions with your clients until they pay you for the originals. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2026/02/sharing-menu-1728w.jpg) ### RECEIVING When recipients open the link, they'll see a clean welcome screen where they enter their email and confirm with a one-time password. That's it. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2026/02/recipient-email-1728w.jpg) Once they have access, they can browse the album in our gallery, download photos individually, select a few, or download everything at once. They can even choose which size to download. So if you're a photographer and your clients only want the smaller JPG previews instead of your original RAW files, they can pick exactly what they need. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2026/02/receiving-vivaldi-1728w.jpg) --- ## ADDITIONAL, SMALLER NEW FEATURES & IMPROVEMENTS This update also comes with hundreds of tiny improvements across the board, including better compatibility with Apple's new controversial Liquid Glass design. But here are a couple of highlights : **MARKDOWN PASTE** We've heard from many of our users that they quite often paste text from large language models and AI chat tools into Cryptee, which sadly comes with potential security risks, like pasting untrusted markdown or text into the editor. Until now Cryptee didn't support pasting markdown, but with this update, we've introduced the ability to paste markdown into our editor. Cryptee can now automatically convert your markdown formatted text into rich-styled text, while still making sure and sanitizing the contents of the text to ensure you can't accidentally paste insecure markdown or text into Cryptee Docs that could potentially compromise your data's integrity. **SMARTER CODE BLOCKS** With the introduction of markdown paste, we anticipate many of our software developer users and students to also paste large code blocks. And some of you have already been asking for ways to better manage large code blocks in Cryptee Docs. You can now : - Fold/unfold code-blocks in Cryptee Docs - Easily copy the contents of code-blocks with one click in Cryptee Docs ## TONS OF BUG FIXES This update also comes with hundreds of bug fixes, of which there are too many to list. If something felt like it was broken, we probably fixed it. For example, for years, pasting text out of Cryptee into a plaintext field like a Signal message input sometimes created extra new lines. This should be fixed now - finally. If not, please reach out to our customer support or file an issue on our github following the bug report template, and we'll get things sorted out right away. ## UPDATES TO OUR TERMS & PRIVACY POLICY Oh and in case if you have a username-only account and don't have an email address we can use to reach out to you, we're legally obligated to let you know that we've updated our [terms & conditions](https://crypt.ee/terms) and [privacy policy](https://crypt.ee/privacy) to cover how photo sharing works like : • Your responsibilities when sharing content *(like: be cool, don't spam people)* • What kinds of data we process *(like: sending album invitations/access emails)* • A few other clarifications *(like: you own your content and we can't see it)* --- We're really proud of how this turned out, and we can't wait to hear what you think. If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy and security. All the very best from Estonia, Europe, — John Ozbay ### Apple is still breaking EU law. Together with Proton, Threema & 20+ Organizations, we signed an open letter calling it out. URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/apple-is-still-breaking-eu-law-together-with-proton-threema-20-organizations-we-signed-an-open-letter-calling-it-out/ Last updated: 2025-12-17T14:37:31.000Z This week, we signed and sent an [open letter](https://appfairness.org/open-letter-stop-apples-illegal-app-store-fees-under-dma/) to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen alongside 20+ incredible app developers, associations and consumer organizations, including [Proton](https://proton.me), [Threema](https://threema.ch), [Deezer](https://deezer.com), and the [Coalition for App Fairness](https://appfairness.org). The message is simple: Apple is still breaking the law, and the EU needs to act. ### What's Going On? Back in April 2025, the European Commission [ruled that Apple's App Store policies are illegal](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/app-developers-urge-eu-action-apple-fee-practices-2025-12-16/) under the Digital Markets Act. The DMA is clear: gatekeepers like Apple must allow developers to offer transactions outside the App Store *free of charge*. Six months later, Apple is still charging developers up to 20% commission on those very transactions. That's not compliance. That's defiance. ### Why Should You Care? Here's the frustrating part: US developers now have a better deal than European ones. After [Epic Games' court victory](https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/apple%5Fdma%5Fcomplaint/), American developers can freely tell customers about alternative payment options, *without paying Apple a cut*. Meanwhile in Europe, where we actually passed a landmark law to fix this, we're stuck with worse terms. As the letter puts it: *"Why should developers and consumers get a worse deal in Europe than in the US?"* When Apple taxes app developers, those costs get passed down to you. Higher subscription prices. Fewer features. Less innovation. Less competition. This affects every app you use on your iPhone. ### What We're Asking For Apple has announced new App Store terms coming in January 2026, but nobody knows what they'll actually contain. Developers are operating in the dark, unable to plan, unable to invest, unable to compete. As the letter states, Apple's *"lack of transparency in tandem with its rushed timelines paralyzes innovation and investment."* We're asking the Commission to enforce the law as written. Free of charge means free of charge. ### Our Co-Signatories We're proud to stand with [Proton](https://proton.me), [Threema](https://threema.ch), [Deezer](https://deezer.com), the [Coalition for App Fairness](https://appfairness.org), [European Games Developer Federation](https://www.egdf.eu/), [European Publishers Council](https://www.epceurope.eu/), [App Fair Project](https://appfair.org/en/) and many incredible other organizations in this initiative. You can read the [full letter on Coalition for App Fairness' website](https://appfairness.org/open-letter-stop-apples-illegal-app-store-fees-under-dma/), and check out the media coverage on [The Register](https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/apple%5Fdma%5Fcomplaint/) and [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/app-developers-urge-eu-action-apple-fee-practices-2025-12-16/). ### Apple's Billion-Dollar Stonewall: Our View from the EU DMA Workshop Hearing URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/apples-billion-dollar-stonewall-our-view-from-the-eu-dma-workshop-hearing/ Last updated: 2025-07-14T16:51:01.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/07/hero-img-blog-1.jpg) Hello everyone, John here, after a busy month in Brussels, where I once again had the opportunity to represent [Open Web Advocacy](https://open-web-advocacy.org/) and Cryptee at the European Commission's DMA Compliance Workshop along with two of the best side-kicks I could imagine to have, [Roderick Gadellaa](https://webventures.rejh.nl/) and [James Heppell](https://formularsumo.co.uk/blog/2025/apple-vs-the-law/) standing in for Open Web Advocacy. Our goal was simple: to hold Apple accountable and question them directly about their so-called "compliance" with the [Digital Markets Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital%5FMarkets%5FAct). After 15 months of the DMA being in force, it’s clearer than ever that Apple’s strategy is to comply only on paper. They've erected byzantine contractual and technical barriers that make it nearly impossible for true browser competition to flourish on iOS. [Our good friend, Vivaldi's Technical Communications Officer Bruce Lawson wrote an excellent blog post covering this DMA workshop, with tons of great quotes](https://brucelawson.co.uk/2025/up-the-kriek-apple-gets-punchy-in-brussels-dma-compliance-workshop/). There really isn't much we can add to [Bruce's incredible blog post](https://brucelawson.co.uk/2025/up-the-kriek-apple-gets-punchy-in-brussels-dma-compliance-workshop/), but we thought we'd publish our version featuring a few video snippets relevant to Cryptee, and our answers to Apple, for you, the reader to enjoy. For Cryptee, and for the future of the open web, this isn't just a legal debate—it has become an existential fight for the web itself. Furthermore, as we saw in Brussels, during the 7,5 stressful hours, when you ask Apple direct questions, you get anything but direct answers, and this pattern of evasion continued throughout the day. So grab yourself a cup of tea or wine dear reader, and let's begin. --- ### The Age Restriction Dark Pattern [One of the most cynical tactics we've uncovered](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/ios-age-restriction-blocks-all-browsers-except-safari-breaks-choice-screen/) is how Apple uses parental controls to stifle browser competition. On iOS, all major web browsers, including Apple's own Safari, are rated 17+. However, if a parent enables age restrictions on a child's device to block 17+ apps, something strange happens: all third-party browsers become un-installable and unusable, but Safari —which has the *exact same 17+ rating*— remains perfectly functional. This isn't about protecting children; it's about locking them into Safari. [An estimated 15% of all European users are under 18](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/ios-age-restriction-blocks-all-browsers-except-safari-breaks-choice-screen/). Thanks to this dark pattern, they are denied genuine browser choice and grow up knowing only Safari. I challenged Apple on this directly. > *Given that all browsers on iOS, including Safari, use the exact same web content restriction setting, what is it about other browsers that means that they’re not allowed to be installed or used when Safari is? \[...\] What specific steps will Apple take to ensure that third-party browsers \[...\] are treated equally in age-restricted environments?* > *— John* Apple's response was a masterclass in deflection, vaguely acknowledging it's an area they are "looking at" without committing to any specific action or timeline. > *This issue is a major focus for Apple currently. \[...\] We're doing a lot of focused work there. And that is an area that we will be looking at and are looking at.* > *— Apple* This isn't a complex technical problem; it's a deliberate design choice to hobble competitors and undermine the DMA. --- ### The Web App 'Problem': Harder to Install, Impossible to Improve As you know, Cryptee is a [Progressive Web App (PWA)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive%5Fweb%5Fapp), which is a type of web app that can be installed on a device as a standalone application and can even be used while offline. We chose the web because it’s an open, private, and secure platform that respects user freedom. Apple, however, sees the web as a threat to its App Store monopoly, [which generates trillions in sales](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-generated-nearly-13-trillion-in-sales-in-2024-130002805.html), and [makes Apple billions in revenue every year](https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/appfigures-apple-made-over-10b-from-us-app-store-comissions-last-year/). At the workshop, I asked Apple why they make it so difficult for users to install Progressive Web Appss like Cryptee. > *To install a web app on iOS, a user must go through a four-step process navigating the Safari menu, finding the Share icon, scrolling down and clicking the confusingly named "Add to Home Screen" button instead of 'Install'. \[...\] With the iOS 26 beta, Apple has made it even more difficult \[...\] So why is Apple trying to make it even harder than it already is to install web apps?* > *— John* Apple’s response was predictable. They claimed the App Store's "*thorough app review process*" justifies the difference. A particularly disingenuous take, given the daily reality of the App Store, so I had to bring up some stats. > *Kyle, you spoke at length about the App Store as if every app is carefully reviewed, safe, and secure, but that doesn't simply match the reality. \[...\] Apple's own internal communications acknowledge that human app review is ineffective... one of my favorite quotes is: "App review is bringing a plastic butter knife to a gun fight."* > *— John* Even more critical is the engine that powers web apps. True competition requires browsers to use their own engines, but Apple is blocking this. I asked when we could expect PWAs to run on third-party engines. Their answer? > *We have nothing to announce in terms of what we will do if and when a third-party browser engine comes to iOS.* > *— Kyle Andeer, Apple* "Nothing to announce." This means Apple intends to keep web apps shackled to their own engine WebKit, unilaterally capping their performance and features to ensure they never pose a real threat to native apps. --- ### A Poison Pill for Competing Browsers The foundation of a healthy web ecosystem is browser competition. The DMA explicitly bans Apple from forcing its WebKit engine on other browsers. Yet, Apple’s "solution" is a masterclass in malicious compliance. As my OWA colleague [Roderick Gadellaa —who by the way has an amazing blog listing out Safari's show-stoppers—](https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show-stoppers/) pointed out, Apple has created a trap. > *One of the key issues slowing progress is that Apple is not allowing browser vendors to update their existing browser app to use their own engine in the EU \[...\] This means that browser vendors have to ship a whole new app just for the EU and tell their existing EU customers to download their new app and start building their user base from scratch. \[...\] Why is Apple still insisting that browser vendors lose all their existing EU customers?* > *— Roderick Gadellaa, OWA* Apple's Kyle Andeer dodged the question, claiming browser vendors like Google and Mozilla have simply "chosen not to" bring their engines to iOS "for whatever reason". The reason is obvious: Apple has designed a system which allows them to pretend to comply while offering a commercially unrealistic and non-viable solution. *No company would willingly abandon its entire user base of millions*. --- ### Building a Web You Can't Test Even if a competing browser vendor overcame Apple's contractual hurdles, they would face another impossible barrier: testing. The web is global. Developers in the US, Asia, Africa and elsewhere build websites and web apps for customers in the EU. For the web to work, these developers must be able to test their products on the browsers their customers use. My colleague from OWA, [James Heppell —who recently published his fantastic summary of our experiences in Brussels—](https://formularsumo.co.uk/blog/2025/apple-vs-the-law/), pointed out that Apple's EU-only restrictions would make it impossible for the vast majority of web developers to test their sites on new browser engines like Firefox's Gecko or Google's Chromium on iOS. > *Most web developers \[...\] are all around the world. \[...\] and they still serve EU users, but they're going to be unable to install or test these new browsers with their third-party engines on their devices. This means that these developers will be able to test Safari, but not Firefox's Gecko or Chromium, putting these competing browsers, web developers, businesses, and users at a significant disadvantage. \[...\] What solution does Apple propose?* > *— James Heppell, OWA* Apple has already solved this for native apps, allowing developers outside the EU to test EU-only features. Yet, for the web, they offered another vague promise with no details. > *I think that's a subject of active discussion. I think we've been discussing it with Mozilla and Google also and the Commission. I would expect to see some updates there.* > *— Apple* Without a concrete solution, Apple is ensuring that any competing browser engine would launch into a hostile environment where websites are broken by default, dooming it to fail. --- ### Interoperability Tracking with a PDF To ensure transparency, the European Commission required Apple to implement a public, searchable tracker for interoperability requests. This would allow developers like us to see the status of requests for new features and APIs. Apple’s solution? A static PDF, updated once a week, hidden behind a developer login. It is the technological equivalent of a "Beware of the Leopard" sign. I questioned how this could possibly meet the Commission's clear requirements. > *Does Apple believe that a static PDF meets the very clear requirements laid out by the commission?* > *— John* In a truly bizarre moment, Apple, a three-trillion-dollar technology giant, claimed they simply didn't have time to build anything better in months. > *We are amazing at what we do. We can do amazing things. But achieving a fantastic solution against those deadlines \[...\] causes some practical realities. We did something that was the absolute best we could achieve in that short timeline.* > *— Apple* This is, of course, absurd. Apple runs complex bug and feature trackers for its other projects and uses platforms like GitHub. The PDF is a deliberate choice to create a bureaucratic black hole, discouraging requests and slowing progress to a crawl. It’s malicious compliance in its purest form. --- It’s clear Apple is playing for time, using its vast resources to delay, obfuscate, and litigate, all while protecting its most profitable revenue streams. If you'd like to read an even more comprehensive summary: [Open Web Advocacy has published its review here](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/), and it's well worth a read. ### THE B-ROLL. This year, we as OWA showed up to the DMA workshop hearing so much more prepared. We had tons of questions —more than we could fit into the short 7,5 hours—, and took the mic many times to ask copious amounts of hard questions. Consequently, we've become the subject of many quirky conversations and jokes at the event. Here's a fun B-Roll video from the hearing in no particular order to highlight those special "Not you, not again John" and "Oh ... it's OWA again" moments: --- ### Why This Fight Matters for Cryptee We are a small, bootstrapped company from Estonia. We don't have venture capital or corporate investors. Our only source of income is *your subscriptions*. Everything we do —from developing new features to traveling to Brussels to defend your right to an open web— is funded by you. Standing against a multi-trillion-dollar company with a $1B+ annual legal budget is a monumental task. *But we believe it's a fight worth fighting.* The web is the world's only truly open and interoperable platform, and it is the greatest check against the power of gatekeepers like Apple. If you believe in our mission and want to help us continue this work, please consider subscribing to a paid plan. Your support helps us keep the lights on and allows us to keep fighting for a web that is private, secure, and free for everyone. For our new customers, here is a special lifetime discount code for 10% off all our paid plans: **WALLEDGARDEN** Thank you for reading and for your continued support. We have a long road ahead, but together, we can keep the web open and free. Before closing this long blog post, I want to offer [Roderick Gadellaa](https://webventures.rejh.nl/) and [James Heppell](https://formularsumo.co.uk/) a heartfelt thank you. You guys are absolutely the best for making it to Brussels despite this summer's heatwave. Here's a photo of us after the DMA hearing in Brussels, about to grab drinks to cool down. Photo taken by our good friend, —and Cryptee's very first user— [Char Stiles](https://charstiles.com/about) [of the MIT Media Lab](https://www.media.mit.edu/people/ch4/overview/), who came to Brussels all the way from the US to support us. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/07/roderick-james-john-owa-brussels.jpg) In addition, I'd like to thank [Alex & James Moore of the Open Web Advocacy](https://open-web-advocacy.org/) for making this happen in the first place, for their perseverance and putting together this band of rebels. And finally I'd like to thank [Bruce Lawson of Vivaldi](https://brucelawson.co.uk/). Thanks for being the most amazing human, helping out in any way you can, your incredible coverage of the DMA event, [and your delightful humor](https://brucelawson.co.uk/2025/up-the-kriek-apple-gets-punchy-in-brussels-dma-compliance-workshop/#:~:text=John%20Ozbay%20%28who%20seems%20to%20be%20OWA%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%9Cadult%20content%E2%80%9D%20ambassador%29). All the very best from Tallinn, Estonia. — John Ozbay ### New Cryptee Photos Design, HEIC Support and bug fixes URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-photos-new-design-and-heic-support/ Last updated: 2025-06-04T09:28:37.000Z Greetings from Europe's coziest winter capital Tallinn, Estonia! We are very excited to share with you today a major design update for Cryptee Photos, and tons of small improvements to our platform across the board. But first, some big news. [Apple has been hit with a €500mil fine by the EU for their violations under the Digital Market's Act (DMA)](https://www.theverge.com/news/627522/apple-meta-eu-dma-antitrust-fines). As you may know [we are massive fans of the DMA, and we've been making plenty of trips to Brussels this year to advocate for a better web as much as we can](https://blog.crypt.ee/after-hearing-concerns-from-cryptee-and-open-web-advocacy-eu-opens-a-dma-investigation-into-apple/). So as you can imagine, today was a big festive day for us! Now that this is out of the way, without further ado, let's talk about our big design update! ## CRYPTEE PHOTOS REDESIGNED We have redesigned Cryptee Photos and added some amazing new features. We think the new design is even more minimalistic and clearer — yet packed with even more features. We think we've made things simple enough that you will easily be able to navigate around, but let's take a look at what has changed! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/04/gallery-cropped.jpg) ### GALLERY VIEW We have redesigned the way your albums look and removed bezels to let your cover photos do the talking. The top navigation bar now takes up half the space, yet still maintaining all the functionality. To achieve this we've moved a few things around. To begin with, we now have a large "+" button on the top right corner, which you can use to upload photos, create new albums, and summon hidden albums. It looks like this : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/04/new-album-cropped.jpg) We also had to move the favorites button. We thought that our favorite moments and memories deserve more, they deserve to take the spotlight, and not just be hidden away behind a boring button. We realized we could perhaps use this opportunity to showcase different favorite photos each time you open the app to remind you of your favorite moments. So starting today, on the very top of your gallery view, you'll find a "favorites" section, which will feature a few of your favorite memories each time you open the app. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/04/favorites-cropped.jpg) ### ALBUM CONTENTS To make room for a few big new features coming up soon, we decided to redesign how your photos and album details appear as well. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/04/album-cropped.jpg) You'll notice that when swiping through photos they will load faster, and when scrolling down in your gallery you'll notice the thumbnails will appear faster and smoother. We've improved the performance and animations to make this experience as smooth as possible. We also wanted to make the navigation bar take up less space, so we decided to hide away all the actions you can take until *after you select photos.* In the past these actions were sitting up there taking tons of space. So starting from today, when you select photos, you'll be presented with our new selection popup that sits at the bottom, closer to your thumb to make selections even easier. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/04/selections-cropped.jpg) But that's not all, we've added one more feature to Cryptee Photos. ### HEIC/HEIF support You can now upload HEIC/HEIF photos taken on your favorite fruit-branded phones and tablets to Cryptee Photos. Cryptee will store the original HEIC/HEIF file for you, and even generate an easy to share jpeg version you can easily download and share with your friends. **What took us so long?** HEIC/HEIF is a surprisingly complex format that can only be opened by Apple's Safari browsers on desktop and mobile. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/04/image.png) All other browsers, neither Firefox nor Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi or Chrome can open HEIC/HEIF files natively. This meant that we had to ship a compatibility layer that works on these red browsers that don't support HEIC. **What does this mean?** It means that if you're uploading HEIC files on your Mac using Chrome or Firefox, your uploads will be slower, and they will use more memory + processing power, since these browsers will be using our home-made compatibility layer. So if you're planning on uploading hundreds and thousands of HEIC photos from your Mac to Cryptee, we recommend doing so using Cryptee in Safari. *< a painful sentence to write, given our complex past with Apple ... we know... >* ## OTHER NEW FEATURES AND ADDITIONS ### Welcome "Inconsolata" & 22px Cryptee Docs has a new monospaced font, Inconsolata. We realized it was long overdue since it was requested by many of you savvy users of Cryptee this year. We've also added a new font size : 22px, which comfortably sits between 20px and 24px, making text more comfortable to read. Special thanks to our user Tony for requesting this particular combination. "Inconsolata 22" is our team's new favorite font combination now. ### Docs Search Cryptee Docs search should feel a bit faster now! We've also made it possible to paste stuff into the search box and start searching without any additional keystrokes. — again, thanks for catching this one Tony! ### Autocomplete Traps Some of our users reported that their browsers' autocomplete / autofill gets really really excited when they open Cryptee Docs, and try to fill the search box with their email address for Cryptee or other random things, even though our search box is very clearly labeled as a search box in the code. Which then would trigger the search, and result in our users getting confused about why the hell the left sidebar kept sliding off. To address these types of strange autofill issues, we've added hidden autocomplete/autofill traps throughout Cryptee Docs. It seems to do the trick on our test devices. So please let us know if you experience any strange behavior after this update that may or may not be related. ## Performance Improvements This update includes numerous small and large bug fixes and massive speed improvements across the board and we think you'll definitely notice the smoother performance. ESPECIALLY when uploading photos. We've managed to make uploading photos take up 2-3x less memory, making large uploads a breeze even on slower tablets. Go ahead and give it a try. Use your $50,000 Hasselblad medium format camera to upload a 400megapixel photo on your kid's $50 Android tablet. It should still work. *It's a promise*. ### One last thing. I would like to personally thank Jesper, who reported and helped fix at least 50 bugs since the beginning of this year, and officially earned multiple honorable titles such as "The Pest Controller", "Exterminator" and "Error Archeologist". Thank you Jesper for helping us keep Cryptee pest free. So this update features tons of bug fixes and performance improvements courtesy of Jesper. ### And that's all for now folks! If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy and security. All the very best from Estonia, Europe, John Ozbay ### E2EE : Finally a way to share top secrets URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptees-new-e2ee/ Last updated: 2025-04-01T06:26:32.000Z Today we're excited to announce a new kind of E2EE, allowing you to share your top secret documents. Here's our launch video. ### UK Government's Push Against Privacy Forces Apple to Disable Encryption URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/uk-governments-push-against-privacy-forces-apple-to-disable-e2ee/ Last updated: 2025-02-21T21:37:29.000Z [Today, Apple announced the discontinuation of their Advanced Data Protection (ADP) program in the UK, following pressure from the UK government to implement encryption backdoors.](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/apple-pulls-data-protection-tool-instead-of-caving-to-uk-demand-for-a-backdoor/) This concerning development highlights the ongoing tension between user privacy and government surveillance. While we respect Apple's firm stance against implementing backdoors, they've effectively chosen to remove the front door entirely rather than build a back door. For a multi-trillion dollar company that champions privacy at every given PR opportunity, their swift acceptance and lack of resistance (in stark contrast to their fierce battles against anti-competitive regulations around the world) raises questions about the reliability of their privacy promises, and highlights that for them their profits are far more important than your privacy. **This situation serves as a stark reminder of why truly independent, privacy-focused iCloud alternatives like** [**Cryptee**](https://crypt.ee) **are crucial.** For UK users seeking continued encrypted storage solutions, we are offering a 10% lifetime discount with code "**BRE2EEXIT**". *Privacy is a fundamental human right. We stand firm in our commitment to providing secure, encrypted storage for all users, without exceptions or backdoors.* — John Ozbay ### Cryptee Joins EDRi, Nextcloud, Matrix.org & 40+ Organizations in Standing Up to Bullying by Big Tech URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-joins-edri-access-now-matrix-org-30-organizations-in-standing-up-against-big-techs-attack-on-eu-digital-rights/ Last updated: 2025-01-30T11:28:00.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/01/EDRI-Joint-Letters-1.jpg) Today, alongside [EDRi](https://edri.org/), [Nextcloud](https://nextcloud.com/), [Matrix.org](https://matrix.org) and 40+ civil society organizations, Cryptee signed an open letter to the EU leadership, urging them to stand firm against Big Tech's attempts to weaken digital regulations like the [Digital Markets Act (DMA)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital%5FMarkets%5FAct). This is a summary blog post, and you can read the full letter below. ### Why This Matters Now The timing couldn't be more critical. We're witnessing an unprecedented push by Big Tech to undermine EU regulations: - Meta's Zuckerberg publicly announced plans to work with Trump to weaken EU laws - Apple's Tim Cook personally lobbied Trump regarding EU fines - X/Twitter continues to violate DSA obligations while enabling disinformation - Meta's concerning rollback of content moderation protections, particularly affecting marginalized communities This isn't just about business – it's about protecting our digital sovereignty and democracy. ### Why Should You Care? If you're reading this, you're directly affected by these regulations, whether you realize it or not. Here's why: - Your privacy and data are at stake - The content you see is increasingly controlled by AI algorithms owned by these companies - Your ability to choose alternative services is limited by Big Tech's monopolistic practices - The spread of disinformation affects our democratic processes - Small businesses and innovators struggle to compete in a market dominated by tech giants ### This Is Not EU vs US It's crucial to understand this isn't a clash between the EU and US. This is about Big Tech companies attempting to maintain their monopolistic control over our digital lives, regardless of geography. Their actions affect everyone, from small businesses to individual users, on both sides of the Atlantic. ### Our Position As a privacy-first European company, we firmly believe the EU must: 1. Continue strict enforcement of the DMA and DSA 2. Protect our democratic digital spaces from manipulation 3. Maintain sovereignty over our digital future ### What's at Stake If we pause or weaken enforcement now, we risk: - Losing control over our digital public sphere - Enabling further exploitation of users and businesses - Stifling European innovation and competition - Weakening protection against online abuse and disinformation ### Moving Forward Together with EDRi, Nextcloud, Matrix.org and our 40+ co-signers, we're calling for EU leadership to stand their ground and not back down from enforcing these crucial regulations. This is a crucial moment for digital rights and democracy in Europe. We need to invest in technology that enables a more diverse and democratic digital public sphere – one that serves people, not corporate interests. [You can find the full letter on EDRi's website here](https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/EU-resist-Big-Tech-bullying-open-letter-Jan-2025.pdf), or read it below if your browser supports displaying PDFs : --- *Cryptee is incredibly proud to stand alongside organizations like EDRi, Nextcloud, Matrix.org, Access Now, AlgorithmWatch, and countless others in this important initiative, and we would like to thank all these organizations for their signatures.* ### Cryptee Joins EFF, Vivaldi, Threema, ARTICLE 19, Coalition for App Fairness & 30+ Organizations in Calling Out Big Tech's Evasion of the Digital Markets Act URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-joins-eff-vivaldi-threema-article-19-coalition-for-app-fairness-30-organizations-in-calling-out-big-techs-digital-markets-act-evasion/ Last updated: 2025-01-28T22:29:50.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2025/01/dma-joint-letter-hero-1.jpg) Today, Cryptee joined forces with [EFF](https://www.eff.org), [Vivaldi](https://vivaldi.com/), [Threema](https://threema.ch/en), [ARTICLE 19](article19.org/), [Coalition for App Fairness](https://appfairness.org/) and 30+ other European technology companies, civil organizations, and industry leaders in submitting an open letter to the European Commission. Our collective message is clear: we need immediate and decisive action to enforce the [Digital Markets Act](https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index%5Fen) (DMA). ### Why Should You Care? When tech giants ignore laws like the DMA, they maintain their power to control your data, limit your privacy options, and decide which apps and services you can use on your devices. ### Why This Matters The DMA was designed to be a landmark achievement for the EU's digital future – promising to break the monopolistic control of a few powerful companies and foster fair competition in the digital marketplace. However, nine months after its implementation, we're seeing concerning patterns of non-compliance from major tech gatekeepers. Some of these companies are actively circumventing the law through: - Sham compliance strategies - Outright defiance of regulations - Tactics that suffocate innovation and prevent growth of smaller companies ### Our Position As a privacy-first company built in the EU, Cryptee stands firmly behind the principles of fair competition and digital rights. We believe that: - Breaking the law should never be a profitable business strategy - Swift and vigorous enforcement is crucial for Europe's technological sovereignty - The EU must maintain its position as a global leader in protecting digital rights and fair competition ### The Path Forward Together with our co-signatories, we're urging the European Commission to: - Conclude ongoing non-compliance investigations - Use all available tools within the DMA framework - Take decisive action against companies that disregard the law We're incredibly proud to stand alongside other European technology companies and organizations in this initiative, and we remain committed to building a more secure, private, and fair digital future for everyone. [You can read the full letter and more on Coalition for App Fairness' website](https://appfairness.org/the-digital-markets-act-europes-digital-competitiveness-at-stake/), or you can read the PDF below. ### Cryptee now supports RAW photos from Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji and more + you can now add comments to Docs URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-photos-supports-all-raw-photo-formats/ Last updated: 2024-12-12T19:36:27.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/12/daniel-boberg-Kfu3c50yM3k-unsplash-cropped.jpg) Greetings from snowy Estonia! We have two fantastic features to tell you about in this update. Let's dive right in! ### RAW Support for All Major Camera Brands DSLR/Pro photographers, this one's for you! After months and months of hard work and engineering, Cryptee Photos now supports hundreds of RAW formats from all major camera manufacturers including [Nikon](https://www.nikon.com/consumer/), [Sony](https://electronics.sony.com/t/cameras-and-lenses), [Canon](https://www.canon-europe.com/pro/), [Fujifilm](https://global.fujifilm.com/en/), and many more. Whether you're shooting with a Canon R5, Nikon Z9, Sony A7 or Leica M11 your RAW files are now fully supported in Cryptee Photos. Upload, preview, and manage your RAW files just like any other image format in Cryptee! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/12/raw-photos-blog-post-cropped.jpg) Here's a list of some of the most popular RAW photo formats you can now upload to Cryptee: — Canon (CR2, CR3, CRW) — Nikon (NEF, NRW) — Sony (ARW, SRF, SR2) — Fujifilm (RAF) — Olympus (ORF) — Pentax (PEF) — Panasonic (RAW, RW2, RWL) — Sigma (X3F) — Leica/Adobe/Universal (DNG) — Hasselblad (3FR, FFF) — Phase One (IIQ) — Mamiya/Leaf (MEF, MOS) — Kodak (DCR, K25, KDC) — Samsung (SRW) — Epson (ERF) — Minolta (MDC) — and many more! Shooting with multiple cameras? We feel you! Whether you're a wedding photographer mixing shots from different cameras in one album, or like us, carrying multiple cameras on your travels, we've made your life easier! Cryptee now shows you which camera took each photo right in your gallery view, with clean brand indicators next to your photos. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/12/raw-photos-blog-post2.jpg) [For legal reasons we can't use the actual brand logos or colors](https://blog.crypt.ee/november-2024-updates/#raw-formats), but we made sure the icons are close enough that you'll understand which camera is which. Plus, we've made it super easy to peek at your technical settings – ISO, f-stops, shutter speeds, and all that good stuff – without ever having to leave Cryptee! While working on adding support for RAW photos, we've supercharged our photo uploader! It now uses up to 10x less memory and handles even the largest RAW files smoothly – whether you're on your phone, tablet, or computer. Perfect for backing up photos while traveling, no matter which device you're using. Love using those on-camera filters? Cryptee shows you exactly how your filtered shots look in the gallery, but don't worry – your pristine RAW files are still there, untouched! So you can see your final results without ever leaving Cryptee. Pretty sweet, right? And if you're still shooting RAW+JPG, you can now save some card space! Cryptee creates JPG previews automatically from your RAW files. Just drag and drop straight from your camera, and browse your photos easily – even on phones and tablets that usually struggle with RAW files. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/12/cryptee-photos-jpgandraw.jpg) We're really excited and proud of how these features turned out, and we hope they'll put a smile on your face too! Now let's continue to Cryptee Docs! --- ### Comments in Cryptee Docs We're thrilled to introduce comments in Cryptee Docs! You asked, we listened – now you can leave notes, comments, and thoughts right inside your documents. We've heard from many of you that this was a must-have feature, so we had to make it possible. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/12/cryptee-docs-comments.jpg) Comments work everywhere in your documents, from tables to checklists. You can find them quickly in the new sidebar panel, or hide them entirely for distraction-free writing using the little toggle switch we've added. Comments are here and ready to use on all your devices, starting today. Happy commenting! ### And of Course, Tons of Bug Fixes & Performance Improvements This update includes numerous small bug fixes and speed improvements across the board and we think you'll definitely notice the smoother performance. If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy and security. All the very best from Estonia, Europe, — John Ozbay ### In an open letter, Cryptee, EDRi, EFF, Tuta, Wikimedia and a broad coalition of other organizations warn of EU Council's "Going Dark" Report URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-edri-eu-council-going-dark-open-letter/ Last updated: 2024-12-11T10:11:58.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/12/EDRI-Joint-Letters-1.jpg) Following up on recent discussions and developments in European digital security policy, today Cryptee joined [EDRi](https://edri.org), [EFF](https://www.eff.org/), [Tuta](https://tuta.com), [Wikimedia](https://www.wikimedia.de), [Element](https://element.io), [Nextcloud](https://nextcloud.com), [Chaos Computer Club (CCC)](https://www.ccc.de/en/), [Article19](https://www.article19.org) and many other organizations in submitting an open letter to raise our concerns about the the final report of the EU Council's High Level Group on Access to Data for Effective Law Enforcement (HLG “Going Dark”). This group recently presented recommendations that would pose a **substantial threat to digital security and privacy** for the EU and its citizens. The **Going Dark agenda** is also characterized as “**insecurity by design**” and would result in giving law enforcement maximum access to personal data. We co-signed an open letter to reject the proposals by the HLG Going Dark and to demand a better approach. [Click here to read the full open letter on EDRi's website](https://edri.org/our-work/shedding-light-we-address-the-flawed-going-dark-report), or scroll down to read the full letter in PDF format. --- ### High Level Group**'s "Going Dark" is rehashing dangerous ideas** The HLG Going Dark proposes measures that have previously been rejected by experts and courts alike. Three main points are especially concerning: So called “lawful access by design” describes a new attempt to **mainstream backdoors** in technologies. This would effectively put the security and confidentiality of all electronic communications and data at risk. It would also severely encroach on fundamental rights of people in the EU. - **Data retention**: The HLG Going Dark suggests extending data retention to virtually all internet services with harmonized rules across the EU, including data retention for the Internet of Things. - Encryption is to be undermined via legal and technical means, so that law enforcement can access encrypted data. The HLG Going Dark suggests tasking service providers with the impossible task of providing access to encrypted data in clear without compromising security. In effect this would **undermine encryption and cybersecurity** and shift responsibility to service providers. This final report follows an earlier proposal of 42 recommendations by the HLG Going Dark, which received [**heavy criticism by experts such as the EDRi-network**](https://edri.org/our-work/high-level-group-going-dark-outcome-a-mission-failure/). The [European Data Protection Board warned](https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-11/edpb%5Fstatement%5F20241104%5Fontherecommendationsofthehlg%5Fen.pdf) that demands by the HLG Going Dark to service providers are contradictory, since **it is not possible to provide access for surveillance purposes and to protect the security of the digital systems at the same time**. ### **Recommendations for a better approach** The EU and its citizens face increasing threats that require a focus on more IT-security. So policy- makers in the EU should reject the HLG Going Dark agenda. Instead we recommend: - Strengthening a digital ecosystem of diversified, safe and trustworthy solutions so that citizens can be empowered by technology, instead of putting them at risk. - Ensuring the security and confidentiality of digital spaces so that citizens can exercise their fundamental rights. - Upholding the right to privacy and inviolability of protected information. This is the right approach for an EU digital security policy that fits contemporary challenges and is in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and case law of the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. We would like to thank EDRi for putting this coalition together and all organizations who joined this initiative as we continue advocating for strong encryption and digital rights in the EU. ### Tons of small new features, faster downloads, more photo sorting + filtering options, new file formats & more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/november-2024-updates/ Last updated: 2024-11-10T13:15:59.000Z Greetings from Northern Europe! We have amazing new features and tons of fantastic small improvements to talk about with this update! So let's get started. ## CRYPTEE PHOTOS Let's start with Cryptee Photos. We've made hundreds of small changes and improvements across the board to make Cryptee Photos better, and in this blog post we'll talk about some of the most prominent features and let you discover the rest. ### SORTING & FILTERING Professional photographers know the struggle all too well. If you shoot your photos RAW + JPEG, and have tons of mixed RAW/JPG photos in the same folder, finding what you're looking for can be difficult and time consuming. Many pro photographers using Cryptee Photos asked us to create a better sorting and filtering system. We think we have a great solution! Introducing the new sorting / filtering panel for Cryptee Photos. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/mixed-raw-photos.jpeg) Let's say you have RAW photos from multiple cameras, some jpg photos and some favorited photos in the same folder, and you would like to only see your favorite photos. You can now use filters to drill down to find what you're looking for in your albums. i.e. if you want to see only your favorites, you can do that! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/fav-filter-1.jpeg) Or if you would like to see only your RAW photos, and make sure the first ones in the list are your favorites, you can do that too! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/raw-filter-1.jpeg) What if you want to see only your favorite RAW photos, and combine the filters? You can do that as well. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/raw-filter-2.jpeg) We think this is going to make managing large photo galleries A LOT easier. ### FASTER DOWNLOADS & EASIER SHARING WITH OUR NEW DOWNLOADER As some of you may have noticed, we used to have some limitations around how many photos you could download simultaneously on your phones/tablets, due to limitations of mobile browsers and operating systems. <*especially on platforms made by a company named after a fruit*\> After some experimentation we've come up with a solution that gets rid of all these limitations, and in addition make it extremely easy to download / share as many of your photos from Cryptee Photos with everyone! First, you can now pick three different sizes of your photos to download/share. Perhaps you're on the go, and don't need to download the gigantic 100mb RAW photo, or massive 100megapixel JPG files on your phone. Maybe you just want to download a 2048px photo to post on your social media account or share with friends. You can now pick between three different sizes when downloading. (original, large and small) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/downloader.jpeg) And you can now share as many of these photos as you'd like with your friends on Signal or Whatsapp, or publish them on your favorite social media apps, all with one tap. The same way you would share photos from any other app. Cryptee now supports your device's built in share popup. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/IMG_7327.jpg) ### A BETTER WAY TO MOVE / ORGANIZE PHOTOS You can now move and organize your photo library easier! In the past you had to pick from a list of album names, which wasn't intuitive. Now the albums in the move popup are sorted based on date (most recent one on the top) and they have crispy thumbnails to help you find the album you're looking for faster. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/move.jpeg) ### RAW FORMATS One more thing. Let's talk about RAW formats. Last year we introduced support for Leica, Hasselblad, TIFF and a bunch of other RAW formats for professional cameras. But what about mobile devices? Nowadays our phones have incredible cameras and some even shoot RAW photos. One phone in particular, made by a company named after a fruit, shoots great DNG RAW photos. Cryptee Photos is now compatible with ProRAW™️ photos! Cryptee can even generate different sized thumbnails, and let you download jpg versions with our new downloader. So If you have a phone made by a company named after the forbidden fruit, and take ProRAW™️ photos we also try to make it easier for you to spot those photos in your photo library with a little fruit logo next to your photos. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/fruit-company-logo-1.jpeg) Now you might be thinking to yourselves ... but ... that's not ... the logo ... is that ... wh... ? Dear reader, [you may or may not know that we've been battling the fruit company and loudly calling out their gate-keeping monopolistic actions for a while now. And after hearing our concerns in person, in Brussels, the European Commission opened an investigation into the fruit company](https://blog.crypt.ee/after-hearing-concerns-from-cryptee-and-open-web-advocacy-eu-opens-a-dma-investigation-into-apple/). So naturally when we asked our legal team if we can use/show the fruit company's logo to our users to help them easily find their ProRAW™️ photos ... Our legal team said : > *'Nay, good sirs! Shall we dance with the litigious serpents of trademark? Perish the thought! Let not a pixel of their hallowed fruited emblem grace our humble interface, lest we summon forth a tempest of cease and desist, raining writs most thunderous upon our mortal heads! Forbear, I say, forbear!'* So anyhow, we wanted to help you find your RAW photos easier, but we realized we probably can't get legal permission to use *that forbidden rotten fruit logo.* And that, dear reader, is why we decided to create a silly new icon to help you find photos taken with the fruit company's device – a pixelated tiny pear wearing legal-approved sunglasses, looking suspiciously like it just lawyered up and is ready to fight copyright infringement with a tiny briefcase. We hope every time you see our passive-aggressive pear-shaped meme/work of art in your photo library, a pixelated symbol of resistance, you'll chuckle at our rebellion and it brings you joy. ## CRYPTEE DOCS Let's continue with improvements to Cryptee Docs. We have added the ability to add all sorts of different links to Cryptee Docs, and we think these will make you 100x more productive! You can now use linking methods like : **mailto://** to trigger sending emails straight from Cryptee Docs. **sms://** to trigger sending sms messages straight from Cryptee Docs. **tel://** to trigger phone calls straight from Cryptee Docs. You can now also launch the following apps straight from Cryptee Docs : **slack**, **skype**, **matrix**, and even **facetime**™️ — so you can make conference calls / chat with your peers and friends easily. As well as : **spotify** and **maps**, so that you can link directly to your playlists or an address you wish to walk to from Cryptee Docs. And my personal favorite. You can now trigger iOS™️ & Mac™️ Shortcuts™️ directly from Cryptee Docs. Pure black magic. Cryptee Docs now supports shortcut links! Meaning that if you have an automation, you can launch them straight from Cryptee Docs. All you have to do is follow this guide by the fruit company, and grab the URL/link of your shortcut : https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/run-a-shortcut-from-a-url-apd624386f42/ios You can then use your shortcut's link in Cryptee Docs (in the same way you'd add a link to websites etc) to do all sorts of cool things and trigger your automations. With the features we've added in this update, you can now do all sorts of cool things like : — Launch Spotify to play your favorite album while writing your daily journal — Trigger Philips Hue lights after you finish writing your evening journal — Or even create a secret contact list inside Cryptee you can quickly call or text straight from within Cryptee Docs! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/10/dial.jpg) We're really looking forward to hearing all the cool use cases you come up with, and in the near future we will be shipping some further additions to our user interface to make these productivity features easier! --- ## AND OF COURSE TONS OF BUG FIXES & PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS. This update also includes hundreds of small bug fixes and speed improvements here and there. For example, on desktops and Android devices you'll notice launching Docs and Photos from your home screen is now much MUCH faster, with a really smooth transition. --- We have a few busy and dark winter months ahead, and we can't wait to share all the cool things we've been working on with you. If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy and security. All the very best from Estonia, Europe, — John Ozbay ### Talking about Privacy, PWAs, Protecting People ... and Pianos with Vivaldi Browser on their podcast. URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-vivaldi-browser-podcast/ Last updated: 2024-10-01T18:13:07.000Z Hello Everyone, I'm excited to share that I recently had the pleasure and honor of sitting down for a podcast episode with the Technical Communications Officer of the [Vivaldi Browser](https://vivaldi.com), [Bruce Lawson](https://brucelawson.co.uk/). As many of you may know, [Vivaldi](https://vivaldi.com) is a privacy-focused web browser that shares many of our values here at Cryptee, and our favorite browser to work with here at Cryptee. So this was a particularly fun and exciting conversation for me. Here's the youtube video of the podcast : And here is the Spotify audio-only version if you wish to listen to it : [and here it is on Vivaldi's blog](https://vivaldi.com/blog/john-ozbay/). — During our conversation, we delved into several topics that are close to our hearts: **Privacy and Security** — We discussed the importance of digital privacy in today's interconnected world and how both Cryptee and Vivaldi are working to protect users' data. **Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), Big Tech & the EU —** We talked about PWAs and our mutual love for them, as well as Big Tech, European Union and how Big Fruit Co. and their grip on tech affects small companies like us. **The Unexpected —** Perhaps many of you do not know, [I am also a classical composer](https://open.spotify.com/artist/4QGD7gprTIdWcIIKW6lXtI). So you can imagine how thrilled I was to geek out about classical music on the podcast of a company named after the great classical composer Vivaldi! Talk about a perfect harmony of tech and music! I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Bruce for hosting me and for the engaging discussion, as well as Jon von Tetzchner for making our favorite browser, Vivaldi. Their commitment to privacy and user empowerment aligns closely with our mission at Cryptee. So thank you all for making this happen — and thanks Bendik for the wonderful interview video! --- As always, we're grateful for your support and trust in Cryptee. Stay tuned for more updates and insights as we continue our journey to make privacy accessible to everyone. All the very best from Northern Europe, — John Ozbay ### Cryptee, EDRi, F-Droid, Free Software Foundation Europe, and others sent a joint submission to European Commission on Apple's DMA non-compliance URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-edri-f-droid-free-software-foundation-europe-and-others-sent-a-joint-submission-to-european-commission-on-apples-dma-non-compliance/ Last updated: 2024-07-04T12:52:17.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/cryptee-edri-2-1.jpg) Following up on the conversations and questions at the European Commission's DMA hearings for Apple Inc., together with [EDRi (European Digital Rights)](https://edri.org), [F-Droid](https://f-droid.org/en/), [Free Software Foundation Europe](https://fsfe.org/) and other undersigned civil society organizations, today we have submitted additional information to the European Commission for their consideration. We hope that our joint submission will contribute to European Commission's ongoing non-compliance investigations of Apple, [including the one newly announced at the ECN DMA Conference this week](https://www.politico.eu/article/margrethe-vestager-digital-rules-big-tech-apple-antitrust/), which we attended. We would like to thank the European Commission's DMA enforcement team for all their hard work, and we would like to state that we're particularly encouraged by [Vice President, European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager's remarks during the ECN DMA conference](https://www.politico.eu/article/margrethe-vestager-digital-rules-big-tech-apple-antitrust/) that there are "no reservations about proceeding to structural remedies." [You can find our published joint submission on EDRi's website](https://edri.org/our-work/apple-must-comply-with-the-dma-urges-civil-society-call-to-european-commission/) or read/download it below. Signed, [Cryptee](https://crypt.ee), John Ozbay, Founder & CEO [EDRi](https://edri.org), Jan Penfrat, Senior Policy Advisor [Article 19](https://www.article19.org), Mark Dempsey, Senior Advocacy Officer [F-Droid,](https://f-droid.org/en/) Hans-Christoph Steiner, Technical Lead [Free Software Foundation Europe](https://fsfe.org/), Lucas Lasota, Senior Project Manager [Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte](https://freiheitsrechte.org), Svea Windwehr, Project Coordinator [Guardian Project](https://guardianproject.info), Nathan Freitas, Founder [Murena](murena.com/), Rik Viergever, Public Affairs, Partnerships & Fair Tech [Privacy International](https://privacyinternational.org), Eliot Bendinelli, Program Director [The App Fair Project](https://appfair.org/), Marc Prud'hommeaux, Founder ### Document templates, massive performance improvements & more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/doc-templates-massive-performance-improvements-and-tons-of-new-features-to/ Last updated: 2024-06-04T17:27:04.000Z Greetings from Estonia, Europe! We have some amazing news, there's tons of new features to talk about and cover, so let's not waste time and get started. ## DOCUMENT TEMPLATES This one's huge. You can now create custom document templates to start writing even quicker with our document templates. You can either create your own custom templates to kick things off quickly when journaling or writing letters, or you can choose from a variety of professionally designed templates by our team, like letters, bookmarks, brochures, letterhead, invoice, presentation decks etc. So how does this all work? ### IMPROVED NEW DOCUMENT POPUP ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/new-doc-popup.jpg) First thing you'll notice is that the New Document popup is now bigger, better, and has more features! You can now : - Start a document from scratch (or use the hotkey : `⏎` ) - Start a document using a template ( or use the hotkey : `shift + ⏎` ) - Quickly name a document using the date like "2024/05/24" ( simply by pressing the down arrow `↓` on your keyboard to select the date format, and then pressing: `⏎` ) - And check out the folder your document will be created in, by hovering your mouse over the folder-info icon next to the document name. ### NEW TEMPLATES POPUP ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/image-2.png) When you chose to use a template for your document, you'll be presented with our templates picker, where you can see templates you've created, or choose from a variety of professionally designed templates by the Cryptee team. For now there are 6 ready-made templates by our team, and over the course of the next year, we will be adding more. In this view, you can preview your templates, choose the format your document should be created in i.e. A4, US Letter, or continuous if you'd like to write into your daily journal template for example. And of course you can delete your custom templates. **TEMPLATES ARE FAST!** Once you press the "use template" button, you'll notice that your templated document will be created **instantly.** And by instantly, we mean in the blink of an eye, literally. See for yourself: 0:00 /0:07 1× In our tests it usually ***takes less than 300ms*** to create a new document with a template. How? **TEMPLATES ARE SYNC'ED ACROSS YOUR DEVICES & CACHED.** Your templates are cached & sync'ed across all your devices. This is so that you can create a template on your desktop, then use it on your phone or tablet if you'd like. But there's one other big advantage to all this... **TEMPLATES CAN BE USED OFFLINE!** You can even use document templates while you're offline, on a boat trip or on an airplane to write into your travel journal, or prepare an invoice for your client for example. **YOU CAN CREATE A TEMPLATE WITH TWO CLICKS.** Let's say you're the owner of a wine bar, and you would like to create a Wine Menu template to save yourself time every few months when your menu changes. First, create your original Wine Menu. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/wine-menu-1.jpeg) Then, navigate to the "document" menu on the top right corner of your document ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/image.png) Click "save as template" : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/create-template-button.jpeg) Cryptee will generate a thumbnail for your document, and ask you what you would like to name your template. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/create-template-popup-1.jpeg) Give your template a name, and that's it! Your template is now saved, and it will appear in the templates popup, where all the other templates are, right where you need it when creating a new document. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/06/image-1.png) **YOUR TEMPLATES ARE STORED ENCRYPTED** As you would expect from Cryptee, all your templates, their thumbnails, or their names are stored encrypted. *— and in case if you're curious, yes, they are stored like all other documents, and they do count towards your account's storage space.* **TEMPLATES ARE AVAILABLE FOR ALL USERS, FREE OR PAID.** For a brief moment in time, we've considered adding some features behind paywalls like other companies do. But fuck that. Everyone should be able to use all our features. You pay for storage. It's much simpler.™️ If you would like to support us, you can always upgrade to a paid plan, and we would deeply appreciate that. --- Sooo... enough about templates, let's talk about all the other cool small features we've added. ### INSTANT NEW DOC CREATION While we were at it, we figured it's long overdue to speed up the time it takes to create new documents. It's now instant, and should be quicker than 300 milliseconds to create new docs. It's so stupid fast that there's no easy way to show this on a video, so you should try this yourself to see what we mean by this. ### ALL NEW DOCUMENTS ARE NOW OFFLINE-FIRST Browsers are getting better at storage management, so we thought it's long overdue to make a big change. Starting today, all your new documents are now created on your device, offline-first, -and then- sync'ed up! (*p.s. — you can of course change this behavior back to the good old online-first-mode from your account settings*) But what does all this mean? It means that all your documents are now going to be available offline, and that means ... ### YOU CAN NOW SWITCH BETWEEN OFFLINE DOCUMENTS INSTANTLY We figured, since your new documents are stored offline, and since last month we improved how quickly your documents are saved, it's time we improve how quickly your documents are loaded. Starting today, you can near-instantly switch between all your offline documents. It is so ridiculously fast that the video below doesn't do justice and you should try for yourself. 0:00 /0:03 1× *Please note that if your documents have large images or embedded videos etc it may take another half a second or so for the document to load, but that's it.* ### SOME OTHER SMALLER NEW FEATURES - You can now save the actively open document as an Un-encrypted Cryptee Document (UECD) file, in addition to the Encrypted Cryptee Document. - We made it so that both ECD and UECD files now also carry the paper-dimension information in them. (i.e. U.S. Letter or A4 etc) - We've added paper mode margin information (i.e. 25mm for A4) to the document info box - We're extending the functionality of our tables, and what they can do. Soon you'll be able to do even cooler things with tables. Stay tuned! - We've added two shorter-than-'single' line-heights to the text editor, so you can have shorter line heights with smaller sized fonts if you wish. (and we made great use of this new feature in our templates) - We now use Inter as our default font, which supports more international languages and alphabets. You can always change back to the previous font Josefin Sans and make it the default. But we think this looks great, and we hope you like it too. ### AND OF COURSE TONS OF BUG FIXES & PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS. This update also includes hundreds of small bug fixes and speed improvements here and there. --- We have a few busy months ahead, and we can't wait to share all the cool things we've been working on with you. If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy and security. All the very best from Estonia, Europe, — John Ozbay ### Faster uploads, smarter paste, discounts and more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/faster-uploads-smarter-paste-and-more/ Last updated: 2024-05-17T18:02:29.000Z Greetings from Estonia, Europe! We're here with really exciting news again —after a mere few weeks— so we'll keep this blog post short and concise. First things first. We have some discounts! ### DISCOUNTS. For those of you who are new users, we have a special discount going on until the end of May, 2024! Use this coupon code at the checkout for a special 10% off for lifetime on all our paid plans : **ROTTENAPPLE** Why a rotten fruit? Well... it's a long story... [After hearing concerns from Cryptee, Open Web Advocacy, and others, EU opens a DMA investigation into AppleAfter hearing concerns from Cryptee, Open Web Advocacy, and others, EU opens a DMA investigation into Apple![](https://blog.crypt.ee/assets/logo-b+w.svg)Cryptee BlogJohn Ozbay![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/05/cryptee-owa-apple.png)](https://blog.crypt.ee/after-hearing-concerns-from-cryptee-and-open-web-advocacy-eu-opens-a-dma-investigation-into-apple/) ### SMARTER PASTE! Perhaps you've heard. This week Microsoft™️ announced that they've finally fixed the annoying default paste settings of Word™️ [Microsoft Word just fixed its default paste optionNo more messing with your document’s formatting.![](https://www.theverge.com/icons/apple_touch_icon.png)The Verge![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CCAiZOaSXBZ90QlUG4O76gDxwwc=/0x0:2040x1360/1200x628/filters:focal(1020x680:1021x681)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24347780/STK095_Microsoft_04.jpg)](https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/13/24155312/microsoft-word-default-paste-option-merge-formatting) So ... we thought, what better time to update Cryptee's default paste settings as well. When you paste something into Cryptee using: `cmd` \+ `v` or `ctrl` \+ `v` Cryptee will now by default strip all styling (like background colors, color, size, different fonts etc) except for the things you actually care for when pasting, like bold, italic, links, code etc to match your Cryptee document's appearance. Previously this was only possible using the shortcuts : `cmd` \+ `shift` \+ `v` or `ctrl` \+ `shift` \+ `v` We made it so that this shortcut now strips all styling, including bold, italic, links, code etc, and pastes plain text. So you can now paste peacefully folks! You no longer need to experience *paste traumatic stress* on Cryptee. ### UP TO 6X FASTER DOCUMENT SAVES & 2X FASTER PHOTO UPLOADS! You heard that right. Your docs will now be encrypted, saved and uploaded ridiculously fast. Up to 6x faster for most documents —docs smaller than 5mb. In addition, your photos will now be encrypted and uploaded up to 2x faster. For the past 1 year or so, we've been working around the clock, slowly making updates to our servers. This year, we started routing traffic more intelligently to our data-centers, and finally, today is the day we can start reaping the benefits of all this work. For some of our users, it used to take up to 3-4 seconds to save their documents. This wasn't acceptable by our standards. We managed to bring this down to 500 - 600ms. Uploading stuff is *so fast* now that it made us realize our save animation is slower than the actual upload time. So we updated our famous green save-bar as well. Next time you hit `cmd` \+ `s` or `ctrl` \+ `s` check out your save bar. We promise you'll notice just how much faster things are now. ### WE FIXED A TON OF BUGS. Metric tons of bugs. We would like to thank you all for reporting us all these issues, helping us reproduce the bugs and for filing [github](https://github.com/cryptee/web-client) issues if you're proficient with programming. For example, Cryptee Docs now can now count words correctly in languages like Japanese, or that our news popup won't jump out annoyingly as often anymore, and apps will remember if you've already read the news. --- If you read all the way down here, thank you for sticking with us and helping us defend your rights, privacy and security! We hope you're enjoying Cryptee! All the very best from Estonia, Europe, — John Ozbay ### 2x Memory Efficient Encryption & More! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/2x-memory-efficient-encryption/ Last updated: 2024-05-02T06:33:15.000Z Hi everyone! We're here with a fantastic update, and we'll keep this blog post short. ### Our encryption / decryption is now 2x more memory efficient. Long story short, we sacrificed compatibility for 4+ year old browsers and that made streaming encryption/decryption about 2x more memory efficient for 95% of all devices. So now is a good time to update your browser if you've waited 4 years. This change may break our streaming encryption features for weird exotic browsers, but you probably shouldn't be using rare exotic browsers. ### Our checkout now supports Stripe Link. If you are a cool Stripe user and saved your payment details using Stripe Link, you can now check out faster without having to enter your card details manually again. ### We fixed a ton of bugs. Like a lot of them. Mostly bugs caused by a certain company named after a fruit on their fruit-flavored browser. So if you're using a fruity-phone or fruity-pad, your photo-uploads won't be weirdly stretched anymore. ### There's a new Techlore Interview about Cryptee I had a fantastic multi-hour-long chat with Henry from Techlore about Cryptee, digital rights, Estonia, Europe, my bad hair year, big tech, the company named after fruit, and more! Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy our long chat in two parts : ### IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HELP US DEFEND YOUR RIGHTS, SUBSCRIBE TO A PAID PLAN. <*standing against a monolithic $3T company named after a fruit is no easy task folks*\> Cryptee is a tiny company out of Estonia, Europe, with very limited resources, and we've been doing our best to fight for your rights and keeping you safe since 2017\. Everything we do is thanks to your help and paid support. Unlike countless other companies in the industry, we don't have investors or venture capital firms backing us. *Only your your subscriptions.* We're proudly bootstrapped, independent, profitable and sustainable, and all this is thanks to your help and paid support. If you'd like us to keep doing what we're doing for many more years to come, and help us fight the fruit company, other tech giants and their unfair policies, subscribe to one of our paid plans, it would help us a lot! In fact for those of you who are new customers, here's a special coupon code that will give you 10% off for lifetime on all our paid plans : **ROTTENAPPLE** --- If you read all the way down here, thank you for sticking with us and helping us defend your rights! We hope you're enjoying Cryptee! All the very best from winter-wonderland Estonia, Europe — John Ozbay ### After hearing concerns from Cryptee, Open Web Advocacy, and others, EU opens a DMA investigation into Apple URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/after-hearing-concerns-from-cryptee-and-open-web-advocacy-eu-opens-a-dma-investigation-into-apple/ Last updated: 2024-05-17T14:59:38.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/cryptee-owa-apple.jpg) Hello Everyone, John here, back in Northern Europe with some updates. Having followed the concerns raised by Cryptee & [Open Web Advocacy](https://open-web-advocacy.org/), EU's DMA team invited us to a hearing to better understand Apple's anti-competitive behavior and its impact on European companies like Cryptee, the web and everyone around the world. EU also invited gatekeepers like Apple to answer questions on their compliance plans from stakeholders like Cryptee, [Open Web Advocacy](https://open-web-advocacy.org/), [EDRi](https://edri.org/), and many others (but not from the EU themselves). So last week I went to Brussels for a 7,5 hour long European Commission hearing to represent [Open Web Advocacy](https://open-web-advocacy.org/) and explain how Apple's anti-competitive behavior hurts the web, as well as call out Apple's legal team's BS non-answers to our questions and concerns. A week after the hearing, [EU announced that they opened a DMA investigation into Apple and other big tech companies](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip%5F24%5F1689). We warmly welcomed and celebrated EU's investigations with cold Belgian kriek beers in our hands, and it is quite telling that the investigation is announced after last week's sessions. --- At the hearing, Apple's responses to our questions were just that: *responses*, rather than **answers**. See for yourself! I asked why a user who selects Firefox from the browser choice screen will still see Safari in the 'hot seat' position. (*or 'the dock™️' as those work for the Fruit Co. like to call it*) Apple's legal team responded by telling us how customizable the home screen is. But they conveniently forgot to tell us why they continue to give Safari the hot-seat, rather than promote Firefox after the user chose it. I then asked why there is no centralized system on iOS to change the default browser and noted that each browser's setting page has the option to change the default browser, except for Safari's which does not offer a change default, and asked : > we had thought that Apple would have fixed such a dark pattern prior to the DMA coming into force but in the latest version of iOS, it seems that it is still present. My question is, is Apple planning on addressing these or not? Again my question was not answered. We are told that millions of people have changed their default browser (we know! choice is good!) and : > we are complying from our perspective with the spirit here. — Apple Legal Team From *our* perspective, this is not complying. This pattern of forgetting the question continued. I noted that Apple's DMA compliance plan includes a Browser Entitlement Contract full of legal traps for competing browsers, effectively making it impossible for competing browser vendors to sign the contract and ship their browser engines on iOS for their EU users. > Will you at least make them minimally viable in the EU by enabling browsers to ship their own engines under a single app ID and rewrite your contract so that they're both reasonable and compliant with the DMA? Apple's reply was that the changes required under the DMA are "a very massive complicated engineering effort". We don't doubt that; luckily, Apple employs very talented engineers and probably has enough money in the bank to employ a few more. But after this uplifting tale of Herculean efforts undergone in Cupertino, my questions were still not answered — even after [Jan Penfrat from EDRi](https://edri.org/our-work/new-senior-policy-advisor-jan/) (for those of you from the U.S., EDRi is the European equivalent of [EFF](https://eff.org/)) asked : > Is it admissible that I give my speaking time back to refer to the questions that the colleagues from the Open Web Advocacy had asked about the contracts and the possibility that those are incompatible with DMA, because those haven't been answered at all? > — [Jan Penfrat from EDRi](https://edri.org/our-work/new-senior-policy-advisor-jan/) Another attendee and I asked whether Apple would abide by the DMA and allow Progressive Web Apps like Cryptee (in Apple parlance, "Home Screen Apps") to use third-party engines. Amazingly, representatives from Apple forgot that a direct question had been asked 23 seconds ago, merely noting that Home Screen Apps will work "as before" (only with WebKit, so presumably the answer is : "no"). Towards the end of the 7,5 hour session, I noted that Apple's 12 page compliance report was immensely lighter in detail than Microsoft's 421 pages or Google's 271 pages, and asked: > does Apple honestly believe their 12-page document enables third parties like us to comprehensively assess whether they comply with all of the obligations laid down in the DMA? This at least got an answer: > I think everyone in this room understands what Apple has done to comply with the DMA. So I think we've accomplished our goal there. Sadly, however, not everyone in the room understood what Apple has done to comply with the DMA, [hence the announcement by the European Union that they opened a DMA investigation into Apple and other big tech companies](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip%5F24%5F1689). Ultimately, of course, our hope is that the investigations don't take 12 months and result in fines. The better outcome would be for Apple to acknowledge that their initial compliance plans do not come near to meeting the intent of the DMA, and for them to re-think and submit detailed plans, with timings, on how they will provide customers with a fair, genuine browser choice. We would also like to understand if, how and when Apple intends to fix their ridiculous and clearly non-compliant contractual terms that make it [as Mozilla put it "as painful as possible"](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052067/mozilla-apple-ios-browser-rules-firefox) for browser vendors to port their real browsers to iOS. --- [This blog post was co-authored by the Open Web Advocacy group](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/eu-opens-dma-investigations/), as we've been closely working together since the beginning of this legal drama. ### If you'd like to follow Cryptee & Open Web Advocacy's legal adventures Subscribe to Open Web Advocacy's [mailing list](https://open-web-advocacy.org/), or follow their [RSS](https://open-web-advocacy.org/feed.xml), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/OpenWebAdvocacy), [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@owa). ### If you'd like to continue to help Open Web Advocacy defend your rights and the web You can head over here to donate to them : [https://open-web-advocacy.org/donate](https://open-web-advocacy.org/donate/?ref=blog.crypt.ee). OWA is an organization of wonderful and kind humans defending your rights. And they could really use your help right now. ### If you would like to help us defend your rights, subscribe to a paid plan. <*standing against a monolithic $3T company with a $1b budget is no easy task folks*\> Cryptee is a tiny company out of Estonia, Europe, with very limited resources, and we've been doing our best to fight for your rights and keeping you safe since 2017\. Everything we do is thanks to your help and paid support. Unlike countless other companies in the industry, we don't have investors or venture capital firms backing us. *Only your your subscriptions.* We're proudly bootstrapped, independent, profitable and sustainable, and all this is thanks to your help and paid support. If you'd like us to keep doing what we're doing for many more years to come, and help us fight Apple, other tech giants and their unfair policies, subscribe to one of our paid plans, it would help us a lot! In fact for those of you who are new customers, here's a special coupon code that will give you 10% off for lifetime on all our paid plans : **ROTTENAPPLE** As the old saying goes, one Cryptee subscription a day, keeps the Apple away. --- If you read all the way down here, thank you for sticking with us and helping us & OWA defend your rights! We got some exciting announcements for you on the horizon, stay tuned for more! All the very best from winter-wonderland Estonia, Europe — John Ozbay ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/tallinn.jpg) ### Cryptee, Open Web Advocacy & EU vs Apple: Part 2 URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-open-web-advocacy-eu-vs-apple-part-2/ Last updated: 2024-03-28T09:19:06.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/image-1.png) Hello Everyone, John here, back again with some amazing updates. A lot has happened in the past week, namely: [together with the Open Web Advocacy (OWA) group we stood against Apple to stop them from killing web apps in the EU on iOS 17.4](https://blog.crypt.ee/apple-is-about-to-kill-web-apps-in-the-eu/), and guess what? **[IT WORKED](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apple-backs-off-killing-web-apps/)** We stopped a $3T monolithic company named after a fruit from bullying businesses like Cryptee in the EU. How? lots. of. caffeine. But, mainly thanks to the amazing people at the [Open Web Advocacy (OWA)](https://open-web-advocacy.org/contributors/) group who sleeplessly worked for nights in a row with us (and many other EU developers) from multiple different timezones. ### HOW? First, we reached out to the European Commission's Digital Markets Act (DMA) team, and talked about how Apple's trying to use its monopoly position to essentially kill Web Apps and businesses in the EU. [European Comission's DMA team sent us (and other impacted developers) a questionnaire, and asked what would happen to our business if Apple were to try to kill Web Apps in the EU](https://www.ft.com/content/d2f7328c-5851-4f16-8f8d-93f0098b6adc#:~:text=The%20bloc%E2%80%99s%20competition%20regulators%20sent%20questions%20to%20developers%20last%20week%20seeking%20to%20determine%20the%20impact%20of%20Apple%E2%80%99s%20decision%20to%20disable%20so%2Dcalled%20%E2%80%9Cprogressive%20web%20apps%E2%80%9D%20in%20the%20EU%2C%20in%20a%20move%20seen%20as%20a%20precursor%20towards%20an%20in%2Ddepth%20probe.). While the European Commission was reading through Cryptee's 40-page long response, together with the OWA team, [we launched an open letter to Tim Cook.](https://letter.open-web-advocacy.org/) *In mere 48 hours*, we got some significant signatories including : Two European Parliament Members (MEPs) (Karen Melchior & Patrick Breyer); a number of significant EU companies/organizations such as SwissLife, Tchibo, Mastodon, Berlin University of the Arts, Open State Foundation - Netherlands; And individuals (advocating in their personal capacity) who work for W3C, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Vivaldi, BBC, Financial Times, ​​Red Hat, Oracle, Amazon, Wikimedia, Vercel, Netlify, Shopify, Spotify, AirBNB, Cloudflare, Meta, Chase, Squarespace, Reddit, Atlassian, Maersk, Paypal, Salesforce, Block, Adobe, eBay, Zynga, booking.com, thoughtworks; and thousands of other developers and organizations from over 100 countries. **THAT** attracted some media attention, leading both Cryptee and the [OWA](https://open-web-advocacy.org/) to spend hours on the phone giving interviews. ([9to5mac](https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/01/apple-home-screen-web-apps-ios-17-eu/), [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/01/apple-reverses-decision-about-blocking-web-apps-on-iphones-in-the-eu/), [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/6e33cacc-3f92-43f2-a1ad-ca860fb553f0), [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-reverses-decision-disable-some-apps-iphones-eu-2024-03-01/), [Nasdaq](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/apple-reverses-decision-to-disable-some-apps-on-iphones-in-eu), [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2024/03/01/ios-174-apple-confirms-surprise-reversal-for-next-iphone-update/), [Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/apple-changes-course-will-keep-iphone-eu-web-apps-how-they-are-in-ios-17-4/), [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/1/24087666/apple-disable-iphone-web-apps-eu-reversal), [MacRumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/01/apple-walks-back-decision-to-disable-eu-web-apps/), [Apple Insider](https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/03/01/apple-reverses-course-on-death-of-progressive-web-apps-in-eu), [US News](https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2024-03-01/apple-reverses-decision-to-disable-some-apps-on-iphones-in-eu), [The Register](https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/02/apple%5Freverses%5Fpwa%5Fdecision/), [Mashable](https://mashable.com/article/apple-reverses-decision-home-screen-web-apps-pwa-eu), [Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/apple-backtracks-on-plans-to-get-rid-of-web-apps-on-iphones-in-the-eu-195232177.html), [Mac Observer](https://www.macobserver.com/news/apple-wont-block-web-apps-iphone-in-eu/), [Cult of Mac](https://www.cultofmac.com/847914/iphone-web-apps-apple-backtracks-in-eu-dma/) [Silicon Republic](https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/open-letter-apple-eu-dma-digital-markets-act-spotify), [Mac Daily News](https://macdailynews.com/2024/03/01/apple-reverses-course-confirms-ios-17-4-will-support-home-screen-web-apps-in-the-eu/), [Slashdot](https://slashdot.org/story/425536) to name a few...) And 24 hours later, Apple backed off. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/ft-coverage.jpeg) While all this was happening, Cryptee got a short cameo in [Bruce Lawson](https://x.com/brucel?s=20)'s amazing presentation at the Fusion Meetup: In the presentation, Bruce had a hilarious placeholder slide that pretty much predicted the future. *more or less* : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/image-4.png) [Which he can ... now ... after the presentation ... replace with the actual quote from the European Commission](https://x.com/brucel/status/1763850353718571162?s=20): ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/image-3.png) Here's a highlight from Bruce's hilarious presentation: ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/image-5.png) Thanks to [Stuart Langridge](https://twitter.com/sil) for taking this amazing photo & creating this amazing meme! --- ### SO. WHAT'S NEXT? Apple backed off from killing web apps, but the fight continues. Today, Apple released iOS 17.4\. While this is a stunning victory for the web ensuring PWAs continue to work for EU residents, it is just one part of a longer battle. Since iOS’s inception, Apple has [essentially banned third party browsers](https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#apple-has-effectively-banned-all-third-party-browsers) from competing on iOS, meaning all browsers currently on iOS are essentially re-skinned versions of Safari. Further Apple has set a ceiling on Web App functionality by denying them access to key features they need to compete. Apple has deliberately ensured that web apps are hidden in the operating system, and have not provided the ability to show an install button as they do with native apps. Combined [with significant bugs](https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#ios-safari-is-buggy), this has suppressed the uptake of Web Apps on mobile devices globally. Despite this, a significant number of consumers and organizations like us at Cryptee, use Web Apps as a secure, open, interoperable and untaxed alternative to Apple’s and Google’s proprietary App Stores. This has also been noted by regulators too. The reason the DMA states to open up browser engine competition (and iOS is the only major consumer operating system that bans competing engines) was to prevent gatekeepers from stopping third party browsers using their own engines to bring features to “web software applications”. This is stated in the act itself: > [*When gatekeepers operate and* ***impose web browser engines*** *, they are in a position to* ***determine the functionality*** *and standards that will apply not only to their own web browsers, but also to* ***competing web browsers*** *and,* ***in turn, to web software applications*** *.* ](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3A2022%3A265%3ATOC&uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L%5F.2022.265.01.0001.01.ENG#:~:text=When%20gatekeepers%20operate%20and%20impose%20web%20browser%20engines%2C%20they%20are%20in%20a%20position%20to%20determine%20the%20functionality%20and%20standards%20that%20will%20apply%20not%20only%20to%20their%20own%20web%20browsers%2C%20but%20also%20to%20competing%20web%20browsers%20and%2C%20in%20turn%2C%20to%20web%20software%20applications.) > *—* [*Digital Markets Act*](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3A2022%3A265%3ATOC&uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L%5F.2022.265.01.0001.01.ENG#:~:text=When%20gatekeepers%20operate%20and%20impose%20web%20browser%20engines%2C%20they%20are%20in%20a%20position%20to%20determine%20the%20functionality%20and%20standards%20that%20will%20apply%20not%20only%20to%20their%20own%20web%20browsers%2C%20but%20also%20to%20competing%20web%20browsers%20and%2C%20in%20turn%2C%20to%20web%20software%20applications.) The fight is not over and will not be over until Apple allows both browsers and web apps to compete fairly on all their platforms globally. Cryptee and Open Web Advocacy (OWA) group will continue to work with both the EU Commission and regulators worldwide. At the moment, Apple made an exception for Web Apps, and said that they can only continue to run using Safari/WebKit. But we think this will change. If you're interested in the topic, our friend, and OWA member [Roderick Gadellaa summarized our thoughts about this in an amazing blog post, which I'd encourage everyone to read.](https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/the-eu-is-not-okay-with-pwa-webkit/) ## WE COULDN'T DO THIS WITHOUT YOU! First, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the members of the European Commission's DMA team. Thank you for protecting businesses like ours in the EU, hearing our voices, spending many hours helping us, and challenging Apple and other big tech companies. It brings tears of joy into my eyes to think that we are so lucky to have amazing and dedicated people like yourselves in the EU helping defend our rights. Thank you for taking the time, asking the right (*and hard*) questions, understanding the core of the issue, for your thoughtful follow-up emails, everything. I'm deeply moved and forever grateful. I would also like to thank our users, members of the European Parliament, signatories, journalists and technologists who heard our voice, helped us spread the word and make some positive change happen in a record 48 hours. And finally, I would like to thank everyone at OWA for spending countless sleepless nights working with us, hopping on calls after calls, waking up to thousands of messages, and being there for us right when we needed. Would you like to help us continue to make a difference? # HELP US MAKE A DIFFERENCE ### If you'd like to continue to help OWA defend your rights You can head over here to donate to them : [https://open-web-advocacy.org/donate](https://open-web-advocacy.org/donate/?ref=blog.crypt.ee). OWA is an organization of wonderful and kind humans defending your rights. And they could really use your help right now. ### If you would like to help us defend your rights, subscribe to a paid plan. Cryptee is a tiny company out of Estonia, with very limited resources, and we've been doing our best to fight for your rights and keeping you safe since 2017\. Everything we do is thanks to your help and paid support. Unlike countless other companies in the industry, we don't have investors or venture capital firms backing us. **Only your your subscriptions.* We're proudly bootstrapped, independent, profitable and sustainable, and all this is thanks to your help and paid support. If you'd like us to keep doing what we're doing for many more years to come, and help us fight Apple, other tech giants and their unfair policies, subscribe to one of our paid plans, it would help us a lot! In fact for those of you who are new customers, here's a special coupon code that will give you 10% off for lifetime on all our paid plans : ****ROTTENAPPLE** As the old saying goes, one Cryptee subscription a day, keeps the Apple away. --- If you read all the way down here, thank you for sticking with us and helping us & OWA defend your rights! We got some exciting announcements for you on the horizon, stay tuned for more! All the very best from the snowy winter-wonderland Estonia, Europe — John Ozbay ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/03/image-6.png) ### Cryptee, Open Web Advocacy & EU vs Apple URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/apple-is-about-to-kill-web-apps-in-the-eu/ Last updated: 2024-02-22T12:48:02.000Z ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/02/cryptee-owa-eu-vs-apple-2.jpg) Hello Everyone, John here! A lot has happened in the past three weeks, and we need your help fighting Apple to stop them from breaking all progressive web apps (PWAs) in the EU within the next 2 weeks. Before we begin, let's have a quick recap of the events from the past few months leading up to this week's events. I gave an interview to Techlore to help summarize all this as best as I could, so if you prefer a video instead of reading, you can watch the video below as well. If you are already aware of the events of this week, you may skip to the bottom of this post about how you can help us. ### BACKSTORY Apple has a number of hostile and anti-competitive policies for its App Store which are **so abusive** that the European Union passed a new law, the [Digital Markets Act (DMA),](https://www.reuters.com/technology/how-eus-digital-markets-act-challenges-big-tech-2023-09-06/) **to make Apple play fair**. A few examples of Apple's anti-competitive practices include: - Requiring app developers with apps in the App Store to pay 30% of their revenue to Apple. ([But also, in extension, users of these apps, e.g. teachers who use an app to teach their students must now pay Apple 30% as well...](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/in-a-reversal-apple-is-now-demanding-30-of-the-donations-to-meditation-app-insight-timers-teachers/)) - Banning alternative payment methods (like our payments processor Stripe, which takes less than \~3%) - Not allowing app developers with apps in the App Store to inform users about alternative payment methods - Not allowing app developers with apps in the App Store to inform users that they can obtain a service more cheaply elsewhere (i.e. via the service's website) - Monopolizing all app distribution via the App Store. Practices which were disliked globally by developers around the world, which is why DMA was passed and celebrated by developers worldwide. And as many of you know, [we're not a fan of the App Store](https://crypt.ee/download#why-not-app-stores), and that is why we exclusively and intentionally only make a Progressive Web App (PWA). PWAs are great! - They help us distribute our app without relying on centralized monopolistic App Stores, which can –and [VERY](https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/apple-is-removing-apps-from-app-store-at-governments-request-at-an-astonishing-rate.html) [often do](https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2022-App-Store-Transparency-Report.pdf)– censor / remove apps on behalf of foreign governments. (e.g.1: [ *Apple removed the Quartz News' app from the Chinese app store over its hong kong coverage.*](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20907228/apple-quartz-app-store-china-removal-hong-kong-protests-censorship) *e.g.2:*[*in 2021, under pressure from the Russian government, Apple removed a voting app, created by allies of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who was hoping to use the app to consolidate the protest vote in each of Russia’s 225 electoral districts.*](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html)) Internet on the other hand, is open, free, de-centralized, and no third-party monopolistic company can casually decide to shut another company down. - They help us release updates immediately and distribute our app **FAST.** App stores can –and often do– delay, postpone, hold back or downright disallow app updates. Firstly, in the security & privacy industry every minute counts, and we think app stores can sometimes be too slow. Secondly, we strongly believe that Apple shouldn't have the power to dictate which apps can or cannot receive updates. [*i.e. Apple blocked Telegram from issuing updates after Russia ordered the app's removal from the App Store, which at the time caused Telegram to miss the deadline for GDPR compliance.*](https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/31/apple-telegram-ios-app-russia-app-store/) - They offer all the same features as native apps, be it working offline, ability to store your data locally or push notifications. We can offer all of Cryptee's features using web technologies, and having native-apps wouldn't provide any added benefits. Now back to Apple. Apple had 6 months to take action, and allow competing App Stores and Browser Engines on iOS. The Digital Markets Act even stated it as the primary motivation to prohibit banning browser engines: > *"When gatekeepers operate and *impose web browser engines*, they are in a position to *determine the functionality* and standards that will apply not only to their own web browsers, but also to *competing web browsers* and, *in turn, to web software applications*."* > *— [Digital Markets Act](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3A2022%3A265%3ATOC&uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L%5F.2022.265.01.0001.01.ENG#:~:text=When%20gatekeepers%20operate%20and%20impose%20web%20browser%20engines%2C%20they%20are%20in%20a%20position%20to%20determine%20the%20functionality%20and%20standards%20that%20will%20apply%20not%20only%20to%20their%20own%20web%20browsers%2C%20but%20also%20to%20competing%20web%20browsers%20and%2C%20in%20turn%2C%20to%20web%20software%20applications.)* This month, with the iOS 17.4 beta 1 (EU), we realized that our PWA failed to launch independently as an app, and instead launched as a browser tab in Safari. [Which essentially meant Apple's demoting Web Apps from first-class citizens to mere shortcuts.](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/did-apple-just-break-web-apps-in-ios17.4-beta-eu/) And we realized, Apple's doing this **only in the EU,** and users outside the EU are not affected. Following week, iOS 17.4 beta 2 (EU) contained a more detailed message. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/02/cryptee-safari.jpeg) No mention of this seismic change has been made in the usual places. Not the [Safari release notes](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-17%5F4-release-notes) nor in the [iOS Beta release overview](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ios-ipados-release-notes/ios-ipados-17%5F4-release-notes). Apple’s silence has been deafening. No reply has been provided in [a WebKit ticket](https://bugs.webkit.org/show%5Fbug.cgi?id=268643), [Apple developer forums](https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/745414), [twitter discussions](https://twitter.com/firt/status/1755406923485122615), and no statement has been provided to the [many journalists](https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple%5Fweb%5Fapps%5Feu/) [seeking](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/08/ios-17-4-nerfs-web-apps-in-the-eu/) [comment](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/14/24072764/apple-progressive-web-apps-eu-ios-17-4). Yet when Apple announced their [compliance proposal for the DMA](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/owa-review-apple-dma-compliance-for-web/), Web Apps were noticeable by their absence. This is the same Apple that again and again claimed that Web Apps are the alternative distribution method for Apps in their mobile ecosystem. > *["Apple is the sole decision maker as to whether an app is made available to app users through the Apple Store, isn't that correct?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6eYLCxxQdA&t=306s)* > *— US Congress[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6eYLCxxQdA&t=306s)* > *["If it’s a Native App, yes sir, if it’s a Web App no."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6eYLCxxQdA&t=306s)* > *— Tim Cook* [Apple had four choices here.](https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apple-on-course-to-break-all-web-apps-in-eu-within-20-days/#:~:text=Apple%20had%20four%20choices%20here%3A) And they chose the most outrageous one. Which is to outright remove support for Web Apps by converting them all to bookmarks. This fundamentally undermines the already tenuous competitiveness of Web Apps due to Apple policies. [Recall that Safari deletes data for any site that the you fail to visit for more than 7 days](https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/26/apple%5Frelax%5Fwere%5Fnot%5Ftotally/), but not for installed Web Apps. But since Apple's trying to convert Web Apps in the EU to bookmarks that open in Safari, this means, once Apple releases the 17.4 update, it will cause users data loss. **If you are a Cryptee PWA user based in the EU, if you have any offline documents you haven't sync'ed yet, you should do it now, before updating to iOS 17.4 to avoid data loss.** We at Cryptee, and at Open Web Advocacy have considered that Apple might try something like this, but dismissed it as too blatantly anti-competitive, [even for them](https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#apple-has-effectively-banned-all-third-party-browsers). Apple has had 15 years to facilitate true browser competition worldwide, and nearly two years since the DMA’s final text. It could have used that time to share functionality it historically self-preferenced to Safari with other browsers. Inaction and silence speaks volumes. --- ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/02/cryptee-owa.jpg) ### Cryptee & Open Web Advocacy are working together to fight Apple. As a European company, Apple's actions directly affect us. So much so that, as developers who live in the EU, *we won't even be able to test Cryptee on our own phones* since we live in the EU ourselves. As for the users of Cryptee from the EU, European journalists, reporters, peace-workers, activists, attorneys, therapists... hundreds of thousands of our users, those who live in the EU won't be able to use Cryptee as easily on their iPhones anymore. So we had to take action immediately. We started working together with the amazing [Open Web Advocacy](https://open-web-advocacy.org/) organization in fighting Apple's absurd monopolistic actions. They are an absolutely amazing group of people, volunteers, expert developers, designers and friends, doing their best to make the internet a better place. # HELP US MAKE A DIFFERENCE There are in total 5 ways you can help us make a difference. ### №1 — Are you an EU resident? Do you use Cryptee's PWA on your iPhone? If so, Apple's actions will impact your day to day life, and we want to hear from you. We want to hear your story, so we can better defend your rights. Send us your stories to : [stories {at} crypt {dot} ee](mailto:stories@crypt.ee) — every story, and every sentence helps! We're in contact with the European Commission's Digital Markets Authority, and they asked businesses in the EU for their users' stories to better understand the impact of Apple's actions. Here's an example story from one of our users : > I'm a photo-journalist in Ukraine, on the front-line documenting the war. Quite often I'm offline while drafting my stories in Cryptee, and I publish them when I get online. Once iOS 17.4 is out, it will erase all offline-stored user data in PWAs without letting the users know. So once he receives Apple's update, he will likely lose weeks of his work documenting the war. ### №2 — Are you an EU resident? Do you use PWAs on your iPhone? If so, Apple's actions will impact your day to day life, and EU Digital Markets Authority wants to hear from you. EU DMA has their contact in formation [here](https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma/questions-and-answers%5Fen#:~:text=How%20to%20get%20in%20touch,%40ec.europa.eu.) (first three dropdown buttons). Reach out to them and let them know : — Apple's discriminating on you as an EU resident. — You wish to use Web Apps on your iOS device, and do so using whichever browser you prefer. — Tell them your story, and how Apple's hostile actions will impact your life, your work. When you do reach out to them *please, be kind*. **Contrary to popular belief, European Commission Digital Markets Authority is not** **a board consisting of politicians, they're not the government, and they're not bureaucrats either.** They are a body of tech experts, and they're not out there to regulate Apple for the fun of it. They are really kind people who are doing their best to help make the world a more fair and equal place for everyone. ### №3 — Are you a developer? Do you have a PWA serving EU users? If so, Apple's actions will impact your business, and Open Web Advocacy wants to hear from you. Open Web Advocacy has [a survey form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0Gs6EFNtXIG0lorh1E%5Fj9ponDZYRx-hlIw6xJMqSBM7bSyw/viewform) you can fill out to let them know just how badly Apple's hostile actions will impact your business. Every story counts! Here's an example story we heard in our meeting with the Open Web Advocacy : > I work for a hospital, which uses Web Apps to notify oncology patients for appointments, coordinate their hospital visits and medications. When iOS 17.4 removes the ability of Web Apps to send push notifications, it will cause tens of thousands of our patients to struggle. ### №4 — Donate to Open Web Advocacy group. OWA is an organization of wonderful and kind humans defending your rights. And they could really use your help right now. You can head over here to donate to them : ### №5 — Help us defend your rights, subscribe to a paid plan. Cryptee is a tiny company out of Estonia, with very limited resources, and we've been doing our best to fight for your rights and keeping you safe since 2017\. Everything we do is thanks to your help and paid support. Unlike countless other companies in the industry, we don't have investors or venture capital firms backing us. *Only your your subscriptions.* We're proudly bootstrapped, independent, profitable and sustainable, and all this is thanks to your help and paid support. If you'd like us to keep doing what we're doing for many more years to come, and help us fight Apple, subscribe to one of our paid plans, it would help us a lot! In fact for those of you who are new customers, here's a special coupon code that will give you 10% off for lifetime on all our paid plans : **ROTTENAPPLE** As the old saying goes, one Cryptee subscription a day, keeps the Apple away. ...or something like that... --- If you read all the way down here, thank you for sticking with us and helping us & OWA defend your rights! We got some exciting announcements for you on the horizon, stay tuned for more! Before we go... we now have a new blog design. We hope you like it. All the very best from the snowy winter-wonderland Estonia, Europe — John Ozbay ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2024/02/tallinn-winter.jpg) ### 2FA, RAW photos support for Leica & Hasselblad Cameras, TIFF, DNG, WEBP support and more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/mfa-2fa-totp-raw-photos-support-for-leica-hasselblad-tiff-dng-are-more/ Last updated: 2024-04-26T11:32:24.000Z Hello everyone! After an incredibly productive nordic summer, we're back with some amazing updates to Cryptee! We have a lot to cover, so let's dive right in. --- ## TOTP MULTI-FACTOR AUTH We know that many of you have been eagerly waiting for this moment. You can now add time-based one-time password multi-factor authentication (TOTP MFA) to your Cryptee accounts. (+additional methods coming soon) So after reading this blog post, grab a cup of coffee, fire up your authenticator devices and head over to your login & security settings page to set up TOTP MFA for your Cryptee account. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/09/mfa-code.jpeg) With that, while updating and improving our login page, we decided to redesign it as well. Starting today, you will be presented with a new even more beautiful login page which can adapt and accommodate different multi-factor authentication methods. Here's what it looks like without TOTP multi-factor authentication : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/09/new-login.jpeg) And here's what it looks like with TOTP multi-factor authentication : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/09/new-login-mfa-1.jpeg) Finally, you will of course be presented with recovery codes just in case if you lose your TOTP device. Our setup will guide you step-by-step to help you get started and stay even safer on Cryptee. More on 2FA, TOTP, WebAuthn at the end of the blog post. Up next is Cryptee Photos. --- ## CRYPTEE PHOTOS NOW SUPPORTS RAW PHOTOS FROM LEICA & HASSELBLAD CAMERAS, TIFF, DNG, 3FR, FFF, WEBP FILES AND MORE. Many professional photo-journalists using Leica and photographers using Hasselblad cameras have been asking us to add Cryptee support for their cameras' native RAW photo formats, so that they could store their RAW photos alongside the JPG images side by side, in their Cryptee Photos gallery. We're happy to announce that you can now upload Leica DNG, Hasselblad 3FR & FFF files, as well as TIFF and WEBP images straight to Cryptee Photos, and store them alongside and together with your JPG images. Here's an example where you can see how Leica RAW photos have a little red ( L ) RAW sign on them. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/09/cryptee-leica-gallery.jpg) What's more is, Cryptee Photos can automatically extract the preview images from the RAW files during the encryption & upload phase, generate different sized thumbnails for you, *and do it all on your device, in the browser / inside cryptee's progressive web app.* This was a monumental engineering task for the team. Un-encrypted storage services can easily generate thumbnails for your photos (and extract preview images from your RAW photos) on their servers. They can do this easily precisely because your photos are not encrypted and their servers and staff members can see your photos. With Cryptee, all your photos are encrypted on your device, which means the entire process of generating different-sized thumbnails and preview images need to happen on your device, before both the photos and thumbnails can get encrypted on your device. Which meant that we had to ship support for all these complex imaging formats, and make it so that Cryptee can extract and generate thumbnails just from your RAW files, all inside your browser / in our progressive web app. In particular, Hasselblad medium-format cameras shoot extremely large photo files, some of which could reach 400-500mb. So working with files this large meant making Cryptee Photos even more memory efficient as well. In addition, for RAW photos only (such as DNG, TIFF, 3FR, FFF etc) Cryptee Photos now stores more EXIF information, such as the aperture, ISO, lens and camera info, and these are displayed in the corner when viewing your photos. So for example, here's a photo shot on a Leica M11 with a 35mm lens, and 1250 ISO. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/09/cryptee-leica-lightbox.jpg) Finally, you can now upload WEBP images both to Cryptee Photos and Docs. So if you like collecting / collaging photos from the web, you can use Cryptee for that as well. We are working with other camera vendors to add support for their RAW formats as well. So if you have a Canon, Nikon or Sony camera, stay tuned for updates in the near future. Some camera manufacturers (like the aforementioned ones) use proprietary file formats, and since Cryptee is completely open-source, we need their legal permissions to be able to work with and support these formats in an open-source app. So if you have a camera that shoots DNG, 3FR, FFF or you wish to upload TIFF files, you can start using Cryptee right away regardless of the camera manufacturer. Otherwise, you'll have to wait a bit longer for our legal team to deal with the paperwork. With these amazing new features out of the way, let's talk about some improvements we had to make to all this possible. --- ### 2X MORE MEMORY EFFICIENT & FASTER UPLOADS To be able to support processing, encrypting and uploading such large photos, we had to improve our entire encryption and upload pipeline. From apps to the servers. All uploads, especially on lower power devices should now be much faster, and use up to 2x less memory for larger photos. ### WORKING WITH FAVORITE PHOTOS IS NOW EASIER Many professional photographers shoot hundreds of photos, but heart/favorite only a few of their photos to edit. We made it so that in the album view you can now easily see which of your photos are favorites with a small heart icon on the bottom right corner of the photos. Here's what that looks like with these Leica M11 RAW photos. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/09/favorites.jpeg) Oh and we made it so that your favorite photos album now loads in a reverse-chronological order to make it even quicker to find your favorite photos. Now back to multi-factor authentication. Let's talk nerdy for a bit. --- ### What took us so long to add TOTP / 2FA / MFA We wanted to take our time to do it right. Security is hard. Really, *really* hard. Making a major change to the login system / main-gates of a platform like Cryptee —a platform which is used by activists, peace-workers, reporters, journalists, victims and survivors abuse, etc— is even harder. Logging in to Cryptee is *already* a difficult process. You need to have a username/email + password + encryption key. And we knew that adding yet another step to this process was going to make things even further difficult for the non-tech-savvy users of our platform out there. So we thought it's wiser to keep an eye out on emerging new technologies like FIDO2, WebAuthn and passkeys which are slowly being standardized by big tech. We hoped to be able to substitute or reduce reliance on the traditional and now-aging, username + password and *we wanted to simplify the login experience, and not make it even more difficult by adding yet another technical security step.* While we've been monitoring the improvements by big-tech companies that manufacture our phones, computers and operating systems, we realized how slow and unreliable their multi-factor implementations were. Here's an example: [In 2019, Apple announced support for FIDO2 hardware 2FA support in iOS 13.3beta](https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/12/ios-13-3-safari-nfc-usb-lighting-security-keys/), which would theoretically allow the use of hardware keys like [Yubikey](https://www.yubico.com/). Apple being the last company to add support for FIDO2, we thought a complete support for FIDO & WebAuthn would roll out right away and we could add support for yubikeys in a month or two. We were excited. Fast forward, sadly —*unbelievably—* despite Apple announcing support for these technologies 4 years ago, *still to this day in September 2023*, *they are not fully supported* *in iOS 16*. As it stands, FIDO/WebAuthn on iOS has tons of bugs, and it's still not completely ready yet. [If you visit their bug tracker here](https://bugs.webkit.org/show%5Fbug.cgi?id=181943), you can see that there are still many outstanding issues with FIDO2 & WebAuthn support and that *iOS itself is not fully ready* *to support FIDO hardware* at scale– i.e. [bluetooth authenticators for iOS devices that don't support NFC](https://bugs.webkit.org/show%5Fbug.cgi?id=188625)) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/09/webkit-bugs.jpeg) Being the security-first company we are, and operating at the scale we do, we wanted to wait and bring only the best possible security enhancing technology, and do so when it's the right time. Since 2019, Cryptee's userbase has grown significantly and exponentially, and we realized that we should no longer wait for big tech. --- ## OTHER IMPROVEMENTS & BUG FIXES This update is also packed with thousands of small improvements and bug-fixes in all our apps and services. It's simply too many to list, but here are the major highlights : — Improved offline mode / re-connection detection. *(It's much better now. we promise.)* — Fixed some bugs when uploading large photos to Cryptee Photos — Fixed Cryptee Photos displaying duplicate content on some devices — Smoother scrolling for Cryptee Photos, which also uses less mobile-data when scrolling quickly and doesn't download & decrypt too many thumbnails. — Cryptee Photos generates thumbnails for photos larger than 10,000px wide more efficiently on low power devices now, and can intentionally slow down uploads to better manage the available memory. — Our servers are a little bit faster. You will likely notice the difference. Especially for the next item : — Authentication / login / start-up times are now a little bit faster for both Cryptee Docs and Photos. — Fixed some bugs with focus mode in Cryptee Docs. — Fixed some bugs with pdf / paper-mode in Cryptee Docs. *(We're still working on fixing a few more, and hope to have more fixes out in the next update. Moral of the story, use less paper folks.)* — We've added more error messages — PDF viewer menu-bar now has a few more buttons for needy and demanding PDFs. — Sexy QR code for multi-factor-authentication. We think many other companies will get jealous and copy our style. *(not exactly a fix or an improvement but had to mention. we think it's so cool, because you can now store your QR code as JPG somewhere in a thumb drive if you want and know that it belongs to Cryptee easily with the logo and everything)* — If you use a Leica Monochrom camera, Cryptee can automatically detect it and give you a big warm monochrome hug. *(because we love our Leicas and B&W photography as much as you do.)* --- ## CLOSING NOTES We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind paid support! All these amazing new features (and what's coming up on the horizon) wouldn't be possible without you, your feedback and bug reports. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe, and all the very best from Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### A New Home URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/a-new-home-2023/ Last updated: 2023-01-28T16:45:01.000Z Hello Everyone! Happy [World Data Protection Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data%5FPrivacy%5FDay)! Today we're beyond excited to announce some amazing new features and performance improvements to Cryptee. But first, let's talk about the new home screen, and what makes it so special. ## HOME SWEET HOME We are working on *three* big things. So massive in fact that we don't want to spoil the surprise, so we can't talk about them just yet. To create room for these big things on the horizon, we had to make some adjustments to the home screen. ![Cryptee's New Home Screen](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/01/new-homescreen.jpeg) You'll notice that the home screen has all the same old stuff you're familiar with. Then what's so special about it aside from its new design you might rightfully ask. For one thing, it's fast. In fact it's *waay faster* than our initial expectations. To show you *just how much faster*, we made a before/after video, and intentionally used the old design to show you that these performance benefits have nothing to do with the design itself. 0:00 / 1× Cryptee's apps can now launch \~2x faster. And even faster if you configure Cryptee to use the quick start feature in the settings > app preferences. We've spent months optimizing the performance of our servers and apps to make this happen, and we're confident that you'll notice the speed difference. In addition to app loading times, we also improved our installer / updater's speed, so the next time you update Cryptee the installation/update process itself will be much faster too. --- ## FOCUS MODE For the past few months or so, we've been testing a new feature with a small group of our users. Focus mode! You can switch it on from the right side of your document editor and edit your documents without any distractions. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/01/focus-mode.jpeg) Here's what Cryptee looks like when you enable Focus Mode : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2023/01/focus-mode-enabled.jpeg) We know that many of you have been eagerly waiting for this feature. We hope you'll enjoy typing even more peacefully in Cryptee Docs with no distractions. --- ## OTHER IMPROVEMENTS & BUG FIXES This update is also packed with hundreds of small improvements and bug-fixes in all our apps and services. Here are a few highlights : **CRYPTEE PHOTOS** — You can now upload MOV video files. — You can now choose to display static / un-animated icons for your videos — You can now choose to display even higher-resolution thumbnails if you wish. (i.e. say if you have a 4K display and wish to make the best of it) — Videos now have video icons to differentiate them better (now that you can use static un-animated icons, we figured this was a much needed addition). — Improved previewer and slideshow mode loading speeds — Faster and more reliable uploads in tough network conditions when you're uploading lots of photos. — Improved search results and how they are displayed for some specific scenarios — Performance improvements in all doc/photo actions like moving / deleting etc. **CRYPTEE DOCS** — Performance improvements in all doc/photo actions like moving / deleting etc. — Faster file size calculations & improved file-size display in dropdowns — Better error handling, and error messages **OTHER** — New Landing Page, Checkout / Payments Page and more! — Speed improvements to our blog — Faster authentication times — Smaller app sizes. (*we think this one's huge*) — Improvements to our help-desk / support experience. Like we said, we've been busy working on three massive things, so this update is actually just full of small preparations for all the things coming up soon! --- ## CLOSING NOTES We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind paid support! These new features (especially what's coming up on the horizon) wouldn't be possible without you, your feedback and bug reports. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe, and all the very best from Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### You can now upload Videos and Large Files up to 500mb-per-file to Cryptee! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/videos-large-files-500mb-eink-ebook-readers-pocketbook/ Last updated: 2022-07-30T19:16:12.000Z Hello Everyone! Today we're incredibly excited to announce the biggest, most ambitious update to Cryptee in the past 2 years! ### You can now upload Videos and Large Files up to 500mb-per-file to Cryptee! ### \+ Cryptee is now so resource-efficient that it even works on e-ink e-book readers! After years of intense work and research, eagerly waiting for Firefox \[the last browser\] to ship support for some streaming-related features that made it possible to use battle-tested streaming encryption algorithms, optimizing our data-centers, servers and apps, the long-awaited day is finally here. Today marks the beginning of a new era, with streaming encryption support on Cryptee. In short, streaming encryption makes it possible to encrypt/decrypt large files in your browser. Even if the files are larger than what your device can hold in its built-in memory. What does this mean for you? A LOT! Streaming encryption enables a whole new set of features that weren't possible before. **Like uploading large files up to 500mb-per-file to Cryptee!** **Or encrypting and uploading videos, as well as streaming / decrypting and watching encrypted videos on Cryptee!** As well as things like much faster encryption, significantly faster uploads, and even things like fault-tolerant uploads, in case if your device loses connection while uploading stuff. And since **Cryptee now uses so little energy and memory, it works even on ultra-low powered e-ink e-book readers.** So let's talk about these features one by one, and look at some of the use-cases these features enable! --- ## UPLOAD, DOWNLOAD & STREAM ENCRYPTED VIDEOS You can now upload videos to both Cryptee Photos and Cryptee Docs, then download or stream/watch them on Cryptee! To make all this possible, we designed a beautiful new video player for Cryptee Photos! Here's how it looks like: 0:00 / 1× Your videos will live next to your photos, and everything will work just like it did with all other photos. So you can upload photos and videos together into the same album, browse through photos and videos by swiping, and even add descriptions and dates to your videos. To make it easier to find out which video you're looking for, Cryptee also generates and uses animated thumbnails for your videos, as well as for your albums' cover images if you choose to make a video-cover for your album. This way even if you have multiple takes or versions of the same video, you can find out which one you're looking for without having to wait for the video to start downloading / streaming / playing. Needless to say, you can of course ghost / summon albums and folders with videos in them all the same. — There are no changes related to this, and having videos in your albums / folders in Cryptee Photos or Cryptee Docs will continue to work the same way it did before. For now, video uploads will be limited to mp4 video-files only. This is to make sure videos you upload from one device can be played back on another one in the browser, since browsers don't support all video codecs and formats. (And since all your videos are encrypted on your device before getting uploaded, unlike unencrypted services, our servers cannot convert your videos to a format that can be played in the browser.) We think that this is a great start, since Android, iOS, and even DSLR and handheld cameras all save videos as mp4 files. So we think that 99% of your use-cases will be covered with this. We've built this feature to make it as simple and easy to use as possible, and all the magic happens in the background for you. So if you'd like to see how it all works, go ahead and upload a few videos to give it a try! --- ## UPLOAD & DOWNLOAD LARGE ENCRYPTED FILES UP TO 500MB-PER-FILE! You can now upload large files up to 500mb to both Cryptee Photos and Cryptee Docs, then download or open them on Cryptee! So if you have large zip files you weren't able to upload before, now you can! You can also upload large PDF files to Cryptee, even open and fill out the large PDFs inside Cryptee! We made sure our PDF viewer and editor can handle these large files in a breeze for you! We also thought, now that you can upload large files, it would be great to easily see how large your files are. So we've added a new file-size tag next to all your files' names in Cryptee Docs. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/file-sizes.jpeg) For your older files, it may take Cryptee a second or so to calculate their size, but for your newer files this will be instant. We've also added a file-size tag to the multiple-selections popup. So you can easily see the total size of multiple files before downloading, moving or deleting them. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/multiple-file-sizes.jpeg) --- ## A NEW UPLOADER To make all these fancy new features possible, we also had to reinvent our uploader. Due to the fact that you can now encrypt and upload in a single stream, our uploader is so much more faster ... Like 10 - 20x faster. It also uses significantly less memory, since we no longer have to keep your encrypted files in memory while uploading, but instead encrypt-while-uploading. Resulting in significantly less memory use during uploads. We're talking 200 - 500% less memory use. Which means, Cryptee can now simultaneously encrypt and upload up to 4 files on sufficiently powerful devices, making it yet another 2x faster to upload compared to the previous version. Between low-end and high-end devices, we're talking about a net upload speed increase of 10 - 20x here. We think this is huge, and it's going to make it easier to upload even more of your photos, videos and files to Cryptee! We thought, while we're at it, we'll redesign our uploader, and make something that looks the same across all our services. So here is how our new uploader looks like in Cryptee Docs : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/docs-uploader.jpeg) And here it is in Cryptee Photos : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/photos-uploader.jpeg) That's not all! We thought now that we're re-developing our uploader from ground-up, if you can upload large files, and do so faster, our uploader should handle network and connectivity issues better too! So if your device loses connection during a long large upload, Cryptee can intelligently pause encryption and upload, and continue when the connection is back up again. So in case if you lose connectivity during your upload some day, here's how it's going to look like : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/photos-uploader-interrupted-1.jpg) --- ## LET'S TALK ABOUT PERFORMANCE. Now that we can make use of streaming encryption to gain speed and performance benefits, we thought it's time to give Cryptee Docs' document and file-handling engine itself a performance and speed boost as well. So we've re-built Cryptee Docs' document and file-handling engine from ground up. Cryptee Docs now uses significantly less memory (about 5 - 10x less memory overall), and can handle opening larger files significantly faster on mobile devices. We thought now that Cryptee requires significantly less memory, perhaps we can make it work on ultra-low powered / older devices as well! What does all this mean? ## CRYPTEE NOW WORKS ON ULTRA-LOW POWERED DEVICES LIKE E-INK E-BOOK READERS. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/cryptee-docs-pocketbook.jpg) You read that right! We realized Cryptee is now so incredibly resource-efficient that if we spent another week or two optimizing things, we could make it work even on ultra-low powered devices like e-ink e-book readers. So we did just that! Cryptee now works even on e-ink e-book readers like the Swiss-made PocketBook! (Albeit a little slowly ... it still works!) What this means is that you can now open, edit and save your documents even on your ebook reader by the beach, under the sunlight this summer. And since Cryptee supports opening PDF files, even if your brand of e-book reader doesn't support viewing PDF files, if you can run Cryptee on it, you can now open, view, fill-out, edit, and save encrypted PDF files on your e-book reader! What's more is that if you use an e-book reader that doesn't support opening EPUB files due to some form of digital rights management ... because it's built by ... ahem... a bookstore named after a forest... You can now open EPUB books on your e-book reader using Cryptee as well! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/cryptee-docs-pocketbook-ebook.jpg) Why is this important? In the long history of censorship and oppression, perhaps the oldest form of censorship is banning and burning books. Throughout history, and even today, governments all around the world ban and censor books. Because books are packed with ideas, ideologies, they represent freedom of thought, press and distribution. Knowing the types of books someone's reading can reveal a lot about them, their personality, beliefs, ideas, gender, gender-identity, politics and more! As strong advocates of your privacy, we wanted to provide yet another way to make it even harder for abusive partners, oppressive nation states and creepy big-tech to look at what you're reading and violate your privacy. Cryptee allows you to store your EPUB books in an encrypted way — much like your other documents, photos, videos and files — so we can't read your documents or see your photos, and no one else can either. Cryptee also automatically tracks your progress in the book, and syncs your bookmarks and progress across your devices instantly. You can even refer to your books, side by side with your documents, or access the table of contents of the book, and navigate to another page quickly with one click. And you can even hide your books inside Ghost Folders. So if you are a victim or survivor of abuse, or in a power-asymmetry, Cryptee makes it possible to hide your self-help books from an abusive partner, parent or other unwanted eyes. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/07/image.png) We think that in the increasingly oppressive political landscape we live, where governments are attempting to control even the bodily autonomy of their citizens; being able to use Cryptee on your e-ink e-book readers, and be able to read any book you would like, on any device you would like, and do so in private will prove to be incredibly critical in the upcoming weeks, months and years to come. --- ## OTHER IMPROVEMENTS & BUG FIXES This update is jam-packed with hundreds of small improvements and bug-fixes in all our apps and services. Here are a few highlights: — New Landing Page, About Page, FAQ page and more! — Better ad-blocker-related issues and errors-handling, and more warning messages. — New tips and hints across services, — A bit better organized settings menu — When you read the news / blog posts, it now syncs between your devices and doesn't keep flashing unnecessarily. \[sorry it took us so long to fix this\] — Improved file drag & drop support and messaging. — Fixes a bug related to the naming of copied files / original files in Cryptee Docs. — Fixes some Safari animation bugs — Blog-theme fixes --- ## CLOSING NOTES We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! These features wouldn't be possible without you, your feedback and bug reports. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Now you can go ahead and upload your files and videos. Stay safe, and all the very best from Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### Default Fonts, Separate, Faster Apps, Native features & more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/april-2022-updates/ Last updated: 2022-04-28T09:25:51.000Z Hello Everyone! It's still freezing cold here in Northern Europe, so we've been staying indoors, happily busy working on some amazing updates to Cryptee. This update is packed with new features, pushing the boundaries for what you can do with Cryptee, some amazing performance improvements and of course lots of bug fixes. ## FONTS. DEFAULT FONTS. Many of you have been asking for a way to choose default fonts. We heard you. You can now pick default fonts, and they will be remembered the next time you open up Cryptee Documents. While working on this, we realized our font-picker looks outdated, and we can do so much better. So we added font-sizes, paragraph-types, alphabetical hints and default font selection to our font picker. Like that's not enough, in typical minimalistic Cryptee fashion, we managed to make our font-picker smaller and more compact than it was before. We also managed to remove a few extra buttons from the editor's toolbar by doing so. Also, this exact font panel, and all these features are now available on the mobile apps as well, something which wasn't possible until today. Without further ado, here's how it all looks like now! 0:00 / 1× **WHAT TOOK SO LONG?** As simple as it may seem like, saving a default font turned out to be a particularly difficult task, with lots of complex technical and legal challenges. To make this possible, we had to work on a lot of technical and legal stuff behind the scenes. First off, storing your default font unencrypted would reveal a lot about you, say for example, if you chose a right-to-left, Hebrew or Arabic alphabet font, it could reveal your ethnicity. We didn't want this of course. So as you'd expect from Cryptee, all this information is stored encrypted, and privately inside your documents, and we cannot see your fonts preferences. Secondly, the legal angle. As you know Cryptee is entirely open-source, and thus uses an open-source license, so that security experts, you and anyone can freely scrutinize our code, peer-review and verify our security. But most fonts, on the other hand are not open source. This means we couldn't simply ship your favorite fonts like Helvetica with Cryptee's code due to legal license incompatibilities. So we had to improve and upgrade our document-format, come up with a new engineering solution that can work across your devices, and one that wouldn't require shipping these fonts with Cryptee, but one that stores the preferences inside your encrypted documents instead. Suffice to say we consumed way too much coffee this year. ## NATIVE SAVE / EXPORT / SHARE POPUPS Ever since the very first day we've launched Cryptee, we've been proudly pushing the boundaries of what's possible with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Today, we're proud to push those boundaries a thousand more steps further. On all operating systems, when file-sizes and file-types are within an acceptable range and where available, you can now use your operating systems' native share popups when saving / exporting / downloading files or sharing photos. Here's what this looks like on iOS when you'd like to download / save a PDF from Cryptee : 0:00 / 1× Or let's say you'd like to send a photo to your friend, straight from your Cryptee Photos gallery on iOS : 0:00 / 1× And here's how it looks like on Android : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/04/android-photos-share.jpeg) You got the idea! We're incredibly excited about how much time this will save you on the go! ## UP TO 3X FASTER ACCESS TO DOCS & PHOTOS Now that's a sensational headline isn't it? Let's start with the crazy part. ### APP SHORTCUTS FOR DOCS & PHOTOS As we said earlier ... Today we're extremely proud to push the boundaries of what's possible when you install Cryptee as a PWA. On Android, Mac, Windows and Linux, you can now choose to use separate apps for Cryptee Docs and Cryptee Photos, and skip the home-screen entirely. Here's how this process looks like on Android. All you have to do is long press the Cryptee icon, then drag out Cryptee Docs and/or Cryptee Photos's apps to your home-screen. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/04/shortcuts-android.jpeg) Once separated, Cryptee Photos and Cryptee Documents will become two separate apps on your home screen. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/04/shortcuts-android-2.jpeg) We've tested and can confirm that this will work with most of the popular launchers in the Play Store, and we think you'll love the speed benefits this provides. On Mac, Windows and Linux, you cannot create separate app icons (yet), but instead you can now right click to open docs / photos directly from the icons. (We're working on the option to create separate apps for these platforms as well) Here's how this looks like on Macs. You'll notice that Cryptee Documents & Cryptee Photos will now appear once you right click on the installed app's icon. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/04/shortcuts-mac.jpeg) We're slowly rolling out these features for everyone, and in the next few weeks you should all have access to these features. If you don't want to wait, and would like to have these features right away, you can remove and re-install Cryptee's App PWA following the instructions on : . For those of you on iOS, don't worry, it's coming soon as well! For the time being, you have the same performance benefits by heading over to your account settings and enabling quick-start to Cryptee Docs or Photos as well. **HOW MUCH FASTER?** We ran 500 automated tests on all operating systems, and on average, it will save you about 2 seconds to launch our apps this way. But that's not all. ### IMPROVED STARTUP TIMES ACROSS THE SERVICE. We made hundreds of performance improvements on both our servers and apps. With these improvements, we managed to shave : \~ 0.65 to 1 seconds from Cryptee Docs startup time. \~ 0.25 to 0.45 seconds from Cryptee Docs folders loading time. \~ 1.45 to 2 seconds from Cryptee Photos startup time. \~ 0.30 to 0.50 seconds from Cryptee Photos album loading time. Combine these savings with the separated app launch time benefits, we mentioned earlier, and for example ... on Android : **Cryptee Docs will launch up to \~3 seconds faster,** **Cryptee Photos will launch up to \~4 seconds faster.** Amazing isn't it? --- ### OTHER IMPROVEMENTS & BUG FIXES This update is jam-packed with hundreds of small improvements and bug-fixes in all our apps. Here are a few highlights: – Bunch of iOS 15 fixes and cosmetic improvements. The app (and the phone) should now stay-awake for longer when you leave it open to upload lots of files and photos. – Some Cryptee Photos fixes when viewing favorite photos, un-favoriting photos and deleting photos, – A little faster Cryptee Photos searches and better categorization of photos in the search results – A long overdue fix for a rare issue with Google-Auth logins in Cryptee PWAs on iOS 15 devices *( ... thanks for the unannounced breaking changes apple ... )* – Small landing page updates – Tips now show faster / quicker – And hundreds of other small bug-fixes. --- ### CLOSING NOTES We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! These features wouldn't be possible without you, your feedback and bug reports. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We also would like to [thank Henry from Techlore for featuring Cryptee and having a lengthy fireside chat about Cryptee on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWqxnY8GOUA), as well as [privacytools.io](https://www.privacytools.io/) and [privacyguides.org](https://www.privacyguides.org/) for listing us. We deeply appreciate all your hard work and efforts in educating the privacy community. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe and all the very best from Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### March 2022 Updates URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/march-2022-updates/ Last updated: 2022-03-24T18:53:59.000Z Hello Everyone! After a busy few months, we're back with an incredible update to Cryptee, packed with new features, pushing the boundaries for what you can do with both Cryptee Docs and Cryptee Photos, as well as bug-fixes and performance improvements. ### A BRAND NEW, BETTER, FEATURE PACKED SEARCH FOR CRYPTEE DOCS! This one's big! We're incredibly excited to let you know Cryptee Docs has an amazing new search engine. We have been silently testing and rolling out this feature over the course of the past few months, and it's finally ready for primetime. First of all, **it's 2x faster**. But most importantly, you can now perform incredibly complex searches in Cryptee Docs. We have prepared lots of examples to show you how extensive our new search engine is, so let's take a look at these wild new features we've packed into the new search engine of Cryptee Docs! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-fuzzy.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-filetype.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-filetype-2.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-exact.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-specified.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-exact-spaces.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-broaden.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-exclude.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-prefix.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-exclude-prefix.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-postfix-suffix.jpg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-extension.jpg) Isn't that amazing? And in case if you're thinking, "that's amazing but that's A LOT, and I'm totally going to forget all that" – don't worry! We have also added a little lightbulb icon next to the search bar, which can press any time, and you'll be presented with these tips and examples right away. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/search-tips.jpeg) But we didn't stop there. We also added a bunch of new hotkeys and shortcuts integrations into the search engine. Once you find what you're looking for, you can: – use your keyboard's arrow keys ( ↑ ↓ ) to navigate the search results. – press enter/return (⏎) to open the selected search result – press shift + ⏎ to attach/link the selected search result into your currently open document We think this is going to boost your productivity, and save you lots and lots of precious time. ### EDIT LOCK INDICATORS This feature isn't new. We have also silently rolled this out to some of our users for testing, and it's also finally ready for primetime. If you lock the edits of a document, you'll now see a little lock icon next to that document in your Recent Docs list. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/edits-locked-icon.jpeg) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/edits-locked.jpeg) ### EASIER ACCESS TO OFFLINE DOCUMENTS When your device loses connection or when you go offline, your offline documents will now be listed first in the recent documents list for easier and quicker access. No matter how recent they may be. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/easy-offline-document-access.jpeg) ### EASIER PHOTO LIBRARY MANAGEMENT Many of you have been asking for easier ways to manage your growing photo libraries. We heard you, and we're here with some great news. You can now, ghost, delete, edit and make changes to all aspects of your albums like their names, dates etc, all while you're inside your albums. Just click on the album name or "edit" and you'll be presented with this popup, ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/album-info.jpeg) While we're at it, we thought it would be great to improve our edit-photo pop-up as well. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/03/photo-info.jpeg) ### OTHER IMPROVEMENTS & BUG FIXES This update is jam-packed with hundreds of small improvements and bug-fixes in all our apps. Here are a few highlights: – Bunch of iOS 15.4 fixes and cosmetic improvements. – Long-overdue fix for accented / extended latin characters in Cryptee Photos' tagging mechanism. Wé árè vërÿ sørrÿ this tòók sürprïsīngly lông êvēryönė. – Some markdown detection and parsing fixes for Cryptee Docs, particularly for links and images. – Fix for deleted photos causing some errors in the slide-show system in rare situations. – Fix for the edit photo button in the slide-show sometimes taking too long – Fix / improvements for some animations to perform better on mobile devices. – Fix for date entering on iOS – Some fixes to our tables editor. ### CLOSING NOTES We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! These features wouldn't be possible without you, your feedback and bug reports. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe and all the very best from Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### Hello 2022. New year, new features! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/hello-2022-new-year-new-features/ Last updated: 2022-01-17T09:49:53.000Z Hello Everyone! Happy New Year to those of you celebrating the western new year, from the Cryptee family in Estonia, Europe. Our home, Tallinn looks beautiful this time of year, so we thought we'll share a photo of our winter-wonderland city! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/01/jaanus-jagomagi-7ixSJHV7OJ8-unsplash.jpg) After an incredibly busy fall, we're back with an incredible update to Cryptee packed with new features, hundreds of bug-fixes and performance improvements! ### YOU CAN NOW ADD PHOTO DESCRIPTIONS & EDIT DATES We're really excited and happy to let you know that you can now add descriptions to your photos, and edit their dates in Cryptee Photos! These two have been the most frequently requested features, especially from new users who are migrating away from Google Photos / Amazon Photos to Cryptee Photos. Here's how it all looks like! ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/01/photo-descriptions-4.jpeg) You can open up the photo you'd like to add a description or edit its date, and press the ( i ) icon on the top left. You'll see a pop-up, in which you can edit the photo's information, like its description and date. That's it. Your photos' descriptions will show in the bottom left corner as you swipe through your photos. Needless to say, in typical Cryptee fashion, all these are encrypted on your device. We think that this is huge, and it's going to make moving from other cloud photo storage services to Cryptee Photos a lot easier. ### GESTURE BASED PHOTOS NAVIGATION We know this is very small, and likely many of you haven't even realized it was missing, but you probably felt its absence intuitively. While browsing your photos full-screen on your touch devices, you can now swipe up/down to close the photo. You can also double tap or pinch to zoom in to your photos a bit more. Gestures which are all familiar from your mobile operating systems like iOS and Android. ### PHOTOS PERFORMANCE We've made some great performance improvements to Cryptee Photos! Photos now load 5 - 10% faster on average, and we've also added some nice transitional animations to make things feel even smoother and more natural. ### IMPROVEMENTS TO CRYPTEE DOCS Some of you mentioned how difficult it is to download or rename attached / linked files in documents. We heard you! You can now take action on the files that are open in the file-viewer. So you can now rename, move, download, copy / attach or even delete the open files. This also means, you can now easily download or rename attached / linked files with two clicks. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/01/file-viewer-dropdown.jpeg) Many of you have been requesting us to add text-positioning features to our mobile editor. After a little bit of work, we're happy to let you know that you can now center, right align and justify your text on your mobile devices too! Here's how it looks like : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/01/mobile-text-alignment.jpeg) Up next, some security improvements. We've improved our URL boxes on mobile. Cryptee can now intelligently detect and warn you if your links are insecure. (i.e. using "http" instead of "https") All insecure links are automatically highlighted yellow, and all secure links are highlighted green. Once you tap on a link, Cryptee's mobile editor will now show the URL box on the top with the same color-coded advisory warning. To make things even better, we've added a copy link button to this box as well. So you can now easily copy links with a single tap. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/01/url-boxes.jpeg) ### PDF VIEWER We would love to write about every single improvement here, but we've made \~120 improvements, and frankly most of these are all nitty-gritty technical improvements to make our PDF viewer faster and even more cross-compatible. Some of these are, – Fixed scrolling bugs / performance issues with large PDF files, – Improved pre-rendering for large PDF files – Improved TrueType character support – Improved PDF Image rendering quality – Improved cross-browser rendering – Improved translations for certain PDF features under the hood and countless other bugs and improvements! ### OTHER IMPROVEMENTS & BUG FIXES This update is jam-packed with hundreds of small improvements and bug-fixes in all our apps. So here are a few highlights : – We've made it easy to close New Document / New Folder popups on mobile – Some browsers were incorrectly auto-filling Cryptee Docs' search bar with emails / usernames / other items and making it jump to the search box. We've improved all our input boxes to calm down all the confused browsers of the world. – Improved the download speeds of Photos after pressing the "download" button from the full-screen photo viewer on mobile devices. – We've improved our drag & drop uploader for Cryptee Docs. TLDR; if you drag and drop, say for example, a PDF file straight into your open document, it's now uploaded into the folder containing the document, and linked automatically. And our drag & drop can now better detect / guess where you'd like to upload the photo, and shows you either Inbox, or the parent folder of the document. – We've improved loading animations for Cryptee Photos, and got rid of some unnecessary flickering. – We've improved the scroll speed of Cryptee Photos on low-end mobile devices, and even if your device is 4 - 5 years old, you should now be able to scroll at 30fps. – The "Make Copy" progress spinner was off center, and has been triggering the whole team's OCD for weeks now, it had to be fixed. And hundreds of other smaller bug-fixes, improvements and minor cosmetic upgrades. ### CLOSING NOTES We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! These features wouldn't be possible without you, your feedback and bug reports. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. Before we go, here's another photo of our winter-wonderland hometown, Tallinn, Estonia covered in snow, showing off its beautiful European old-town architecture. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2022/01/jaanus-jagomagi-GPiskdblvGM-unsplash.jpg) We hope you'll enjoy this performance update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe and all the very best from a cold and dark Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John --- P.S. – Both of the fantastic Tallinn winter photos are by [Jaanus Jagomägi](https://unsplash.com/@jaanus)! Go check out the other photos, they're amazing. ### Paper-Mode, PDF Editing, Encrypted PDF Exports & More! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/paper-mode-encrypted-pdf-editing/ Last updated: 2021-11-02T16:15:03.000Z Hello Everyone! After a long summer of building tons of new features and listening to your feedback, today we're incredibly excited to announce perhaps the most ambitious update to Cryptee! ### INTRODUCING PAPER-MODE. After a whole year of intense work, building up to this very moment, we're incredibly proud to announce Paper Mode to Cryptee Docs! You can now work on your documents in Cryptee Docs, using a print-accurate paper view, by choosing paper sizes like A4 / A3 / US Letter / US Legal etc, just like the way you would in Microsoft Word™️ or Google Docs™️. **WHAT MAKES IT SO SPECIAL?** First off, let's talk about what took so long, and why this is huge news. This makes Cryptee officially the very first and only open-source rich-text / document editor with a print-accurate paper-view, using which you can edit your documents as they would appear on paper if printed / exported to a PDF. Until today, only closed-source commercial services like Google Docs™️ or Microsoft Word™️ had this feature, making it extremely difficult for business users who need to print / send PDFs to switch to Cryptee Docs. But also, some of the know-how and technologies required to make this feature possible was simply not available, nor were they open-source. So we thought, "seems like we'll have to re-invent the wheel – and might as well open source it while we're at it" Today we're incredibly proud to be shipping the very first and only open-source software that has this feature. We think this is huge, and we think this will change the way you can use Cryptee Docs! Enough proud-talk. Let's see how it looks like! Your browser does not support the video tag Needless to say, we wanted to make it extremely easy to use. On your mobile devices / tablets / touch enabled devices, you can flip the pages just like the way you would flip the pages of a physical book. We know many of you like to use Cryptee Docs as a way to conveniently store quick notes as well. So we thought, you shouldn't need two separate apps for encrypted note-taking and encrypted rich-document authoring. We made it super easy to switch between the continuous mode and paper-mode from the document's toolbar. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/switch-to-paper-mode.jpg) We trust it enough to use it internally for our business, and think it's ready for everyone to start using for all types of day-to-day purposes. But due to the extremely large number of permutations and possibilities of browsers, operating systems, extensions and versions of each, there may still be a few bugs, or edge-case issues here and there, especially if you use paper-mode across different operating systems and browser combinations. i.e. if you're using Firefox on Android and Safari on Mac, there's a tiny but non-zero chance you may see small inconsistencies (like font-thicknesses / underlined or striked-out lines being thicker / thinner etc) rooted from the fact that these operating systems and browsers use different font-renderers. Consequently, in these rare occasions your documents may have one-or-two pixels of difference here and there. We're confident this feature is mature enough and these potential issues are unnoticeable, but we also want to be upfront and honest about where you may see things shift by a pixel or two. So for the time being, we'll keep a "beta" tag on this feature to remind you that we're still working on cross-browser compatibility and rendering issues that may cause these tiny 1-2 pixels of differences. While building paper-mode, we thought we'll add in a bunch of new familiar hotkeys to go with it as well! You can insert page-breaks by using: cmd/ctrl + ****⏎** and navigate between pages using familiar page up / down keys. Now you might be thinking, "how does it look if I export the document to PDF?" Glad you asked! We've made tons of new improvements to our PDF exporter. Here's a side-by-side comparison for you. On the left, Cryptee Docs editor, and on the right, Mac OS Preview. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/pdf-quality.jpg) To make all this possible, we've built an entirely new PDF engine into Cryptee Docs. So let's talk a little bit about PDFs. ### INTRODUCING CRYPTEE'S NEW ENCRYPTED PDF ENGINE. It's 2021, and we all send around tons and tons of PDF files! Often we have to send around PDF files using insecure and outdated channels like email, or unencrypted messenger applications like Slack™️ or Microsoft Teams™️. We thought – Wouldn't it be amazing if you could easily export an encrypted / password-protected PDF from Cryptee Documents? An encrypted / password-protected PDF that can be opened using any PDF viewer on all operating systems? And we thought, wouldn't it be amazing if you could easily set permissions on the PDF, like disallow modifications or printing, all with a single click. So we sat down, designed and built an entirely new PDF engine into Cryptee Docs. Here's how it all works. While exporting your documents as PDF files, you can now easily set a key, and encrypt the PDFs. These encrypted PDFs can be opened using any PDF viewer, on all operating systems and PDF viewer apps. Here's a video to show you how easy we made it to export your documents as encrypted / password-protected PDF files. Your browser does not support the video tag The resulting PDF file can be opened in any browser or PDF viewer, and they will ask for the encryption key. For example here's how Google Chrome or Mac OS Preview will display the PDF you saw exported in the video. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/pdf-password.jpg) We thought ... now that we've got our hands dirty with PDFs, perhaps we should improve Cryptee's PDF viewer too. You can now open encrypted / password-protected PDF files in Cryptee's PDF viewer as well. Here's how the encrypted PDF you saw exported in the video will look like in Cryptee's PDF viewer when you open it: ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/open-encrypted-pdfs.jpg) Then, we thought, while we're on a roll here, we should add a few more features to our PDF viewer. **YOU CAN NOW EDIT PDFs, FILL OUT FORMS & SAVE CHANGES TO PDFs** The number one requested feature from everyone was to be able to edit PDFs inside Cryptee, – like to be able to fill out forms in PDFs –, without ever having to download the PDF to your device. You can now edit / fill out forms in PDFs using Cryptee Docs, and your changes will be encrypted and saved straight to Cryptee Docs. Here's how easy we made it. Simply click on the form fields, fill them out, and press the save button. That's it. Your browser does not support the video tag You can of course, download the filled out PDF from your Cryptee Docs anytime you wish. So as you can see, you can now fill out things like your tax forms inside Cryptee Docs's secure PDF viewer. But that's not all. **PDF SECURITY & SANDBOXING** PDF is an inherently dangerous format. Journalists, activists, and even everyday citizens frequently get hacked via PDF files. PDF files are used everywhere for all types of different purposes, and they present an incredibly easy-to-exploit attack vector. For example ever since iPhones first came out, [one of the most common and popular ways iPhones got jailbroken / hacked is via PDFs](https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/07/06/hackers%5Frelease%5Fnew%5Fbrowser%5Fbased%5Fios%5Fjailbreak%5Fbased%5Fon%5Fpdf%5Fexploit). And this is why, we're proud to introduce PDF sandboxing to Cryptee today. Starting today, all your PDFs are rendered in a secure and isolated sandbox, and not by using your browser's built-in PDF viewer. This makes Cryptee's PDF viewer an even safer choice for opening PDF files than your iPhone, Android, Mac or Windows device's built in PDF viewer, depending on your threat model. Since on Cryptee the PDF files are opened in a new secure sandbox, and rendered using javascript (instead of your browser's or operating system's PDF viewer) even if the PDF file has any malicious code, it won't be able to infect your system. ### OTHER IMPROVEMENTS & NEW FEATURES That's not all folks! This update brings a few other amazing new features! **A FASTER & BETTER COPY DOCUMENT FLOW.** We realized that making copies of your documents was a cumbersome and difficult process. We heard from many of you that you use this feature to create template documents; first by making a copy of your template document, then renaming this new copy. We thought we should make this easier. From now on, while making a copy, you'll be able to name the copy and easily add a date/time by pressing your keyboard's arrow keys. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/copy-doc.jpg) We think this will make it incredibly easy to create template documents. Here's an example workflow. Let's say you have to write weekly status reports. First create a template report, in a folder named "Weekly Reports" like this : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/weekly-report.jpg) Then, simply make a copy of it every week, and name it something like "Week 43". While making a copy, you'll be able to see where your copy will be created (in this example, it's going to be in "Weekly Reports". (You can also use up / down arrow keys to quickly pick the date or the time from the list as well) ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/weekly-report-copy.jpg) And that's it. Your copy will be created right next to your template in the same folder. ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/weekly-report-created.jpg) **NEW HOTKEYS** We're introducing a couple of fun new hotkeys to Cryptee. You can now easily open the most recent 3 documents pressing "1", "2" or "3" on your keyboards. Here's a cursor-hover-tip for the "Week 43" document, to hint that pressing "1" on your keyboard will open it: ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/10/hotkeys.jpg) We're also introducing a bunch of other hotkeys in the home-screen. For example pressing "d" will open Cryptee Docs, and "P" will open Cryptee Photos. **AUTO-SCROLL AS YOU TYPE** We know that one of the most requested features was to make our editor auto-scroll as you type. We're happy to say that starting with this version of Cryptee, our mobile editors on both iOS and Android will automatically scroll to keep the text centred as you type. Here's a video to show you what we mean by this : Your browser does not support the video tag **OTHER SMALLER IMPROVEMENTS** We've also improved hundreds of other small things with this update. Here's some highlights to give you an idea : – We've managed to significantly reduce Cryptee's memory usage. Large documents and photo libraries are now faster than ever, even on your older devices. – Improved copied doc sidebar behavior for the actively open document – Faster and more efficient change-detection / sync on startup – Improved modals & popups to make landscape typing even better on phones – Scrollable modals are a bit easier to read / see – Improved clipboard handling for copy / pasting text-colors and background-colors between different apps – Improved color pickers for Cryptee Docs – Added a guided PWA install button on the home screen for non-pwa in-browser Cryptee users. – Added a news tracker / updates indicator to home screen, so you can stay up-to date with Cryptee straight from your home screen. – Better error handling for Cryptee Photos – Faster and better image decoder for Cryptee Photos uploader ### ONE MORE THING. We'd love to offer Black Friday discounts, but we simply don't have Black Fridays here in Europe. Instead the whole damn winter is dark, sunlight-deprived and cold here in Northern Europe. So we figured it's only fair if we have a dark-winter discount. It's a simple campaign really: If you're a free user, upgrade before January 1, 2022 to have a 10% discount for lifetime. If you're looking for an encrypted cloud photo storage, where your photos can be safe and private, now is the perfect time to switch to Cryptee, and it has never been cheaper. ### CLOSING NOTES This update also comes packed with long-overdue bug fixes, both for Docs and Photos, performance improvements and minor cosmetic upgrades. We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! These features wouldn't be possible without you and your feedback. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe and all the very best from a cold and dark Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### Cryptee Docs Editor v3.1 URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/mobile-sidebar-updates/ Last updated: 2021-06-22T15:13:20.000Z Hello Everyone! Today we're releasing a major update to Cryptee Docs' editor for mobile devices. We named this v3.1, because we think this will dramatically improve how you use Cryptee on your mobile devices. This will be a brief update, so let's get started right away. ### WE SHRUNK THE SIDEBAR. Yes. In fact we shrunk it so much, that it's gone. Many of you have been requesting a way to get rid of Cryptee Docs' sidebar on mobile devices, and we heard you! We've been working really hard to bring a much better and more refined document editor experience for mobile devices for months now. And today's finally the day. Starting today, while editing your documents, you no longer have to worry about the sidebar. Here's how it looks like : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/no-sidebar-1-1.jpg) So let's break down all the changes, and talk about what happened, and why we're making this change. In the past, all active / open document's actions used to live in the sidebar. These are the buttons with which you can do things like export document / get document info / turn on spellchecker / see table of contents etc. So to get rid of the sidebar, we first had to find a new home for them. We moved them to the top of your document. But this meant that we had to find a new home for your line-level document editor tools, which used to live on the top of your document, like checkboxes, or lists, or upload image buttons. But we couldn't put these in the tooltips / pop-ups, because you need to be able to press these buttons even when some text isn't selected. So that you can upload an image for example, or start a new checklist. We thought the best solution is to move all editor styling tools + block level tools into one place – the same place, just like it is on the desktop – but they couldn't be in a popup. Also, tooltips/popups suck, because we always had to check OS / browser combinations, and even different Android vendors, to determine where to display the tooltip, so that it won't cover your operating system's copy/paste tooltips. And that lead us to building a toolbar that floats above your keyboard on mobile device. So in short, – We shrunk / removed the sidebar, but don't worry, it's still on the left side, you just have to swipe it open. (or press the open sidebar button on the top left corner) ### WE MOVED THE DOCUMENT ACTION BUTTONS – We moved your document actions like rename / copy / spellchecker etc to the top of your document. ### WE ADDED MORE EDITOR TOOLS – We moved all editor tools to live on top of your keyboard, where they are conveniently accessible. This meant that we can add a lot more buttons and tools that we couldn't fit into our small tooltip in the past. So the list of tools are scrollable left/right. (You can find a video of this below) So here's how the editor tools will look like when your keyboard is open : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/no-sidebar-2-1.jpg) And here's how the document action dropdowns now look like : ![](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/no-sidebar-3.jpg) ### OH. AND. IT'S SMOOTH. REALLY SMOOTH. We made sure that these on-keyboard tools follow your keyboard as fast as your device's screen can handle. Even at 60fps or even 120fps if your device's display support it. How smooth? Glad you've asked. We just had to show you. Here's a video: Your browser does not support the video tag ### CLOSING NOTES This update also comes packed with long-overdue bug fixes, both for Docs and Photos, performance improvements and minor cosmetic upgrades. We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! These features wouldn't be possible without you and your feedback. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe and all the very best from a sunny Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### Summer Updates URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/summer-updates/ Last updated: 2021-06-08T16:00:57.000Z Hello Everyone! A new version of Cryptee is out! This version comes packed with new features many of you have been asking and waiting patiently for! Lots of amazing stuff to share, so let's dive in! ## Remember Encryption Keys Perhaps you've already noticed, last week, we started rolling out a new "remember" button to our famous encryption key screen. Many of our users mentioned that they didn't know they could set Cryptee to remember their encryption key on their devices, and save time. This setting used to be buried \[perhaps too\] deeply in the account settings page, so we thought perhaps it's time to surface it. You can now easily ask Cryptee to remember your encryption key on your devices, and save multiple seconds during start-up time. ![Cryptee – Remember Encryption Key Checkbox](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-remember-key.jpg) So that you won't forget your encryption key, Cryptee may occasionally ask you to type your key again. Or sometimes our security might want to double check to confirm it is indeed you, and ask for your key again. We think this will save you lots of time. But while we're at it, we thought we should build a few more new time-saving features. ## Quick access to recent documents We've all been there. Sometimes you just want to quickly open the last document you were working on. It used to take one swipe/scroll/click to open the left sidebar, and one more click/tap on the recent document you wanted to open. We realized that this takes an extra second, and if you simply want to open one of your most recent documents, we could perhaps save you that second as well. So we're pleased to announce that Cryptee Docs now has a beautiful new landing screen, from where you can see & load your most recent documents. ![Cryptee Docs – Recent Documents & Tips](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-recent-docs-1.jpg) But why stop there? What if you simply want to open the folder containing that recent document? On desktops and tablets with mice support, you can right click on these recent documents, and do all sorts of cool things with them. Like rename, download, make a copy, or open the folder containing the document. ![Cryptee Documents – Recent Documents – Context Menu](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-docs-recent-docs-context-menu-1.jpg) Are you one of the thousands of new users who onboarded Cryptee this month? – If so, welcome! Or maybe you're one of the oldest users who would like to master Cryptee. Either way, we thought we'll make life easier for you. We've added 1-min quick tips here and there inside our apps, like the new Cryptee Docs landing screen, to help you have an even better experience on Cryptee. ![Cryptee Documents – Tips](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-docs-tips.jpg) ## Line Spacing We're slowly getting ready to release our paper-mode for Cryptee Docs. It will allow you to work print-accurately on popular paper sizes like A4 / U.S. Letter etc, much like your favorite rich text editors like Microsoft Word™. But we thought perhaps we can release some of these paper-specific features ahead of time. We all know that feeling... Sometimes you just want to make the text fill the page, and have some extra breathing room between the lines. Until now, it wasn't possible to add line-spacing in Cryptee Docs. But the wait is over. ![Cryptee Docs – Line Spacing](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-line-spacing-1.jpg) You can now granularly adjust the line spacing in your Cryptee documents. And not just for your paragraphs / text. We thought we should take things a few more steps further. You can now adjust the line-height / sizes of a bunch of other things inside your documents. Say for example, if you would like a single row in a table to have a taller line-height, you can now do that : ![Cryptee Docs – Table Row Height](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-line-spacing-tables-3.jpg) You can also make your attachments / cross-document links taller and bigger. ![Cryptee Docs – Adjustable Attachment Sizes](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-line-spacing-attachments-1.jpg) And the same goes for all types of different lists like check-lists of course: ![Cryptee Docs – Line Spacing – List](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/06/cryptee-line-spacing-lists-7.jpg) ## Other improvements & updates Cryptee's about to turn 3 years old, and nowadays *every day,* approximately **1M - 1.5 Million** newphotos and documents are uploaded to Cryptee! *– Compared to big-tech ... it ain't much, but it's honest work.* Speaking of big-tech, last week [Google Photos made big changes to their unlimited plan](https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-unlimited-cap-free-uploads-15gb-ending), resulting in thousands and thousands of users to migrate to Cryptee. If you are one of these many thousands of new users who signed up last week, welcome! We're incredibly happy and honored to have you on board Cryptee! Needless to say, we started growing our customer support team to cope with the ever-increasing number of user signups this spring, and have been investing in better coffee machines for everyone. We hope to get back to your questions faster than ever. We've also added 2 new data-centers this year, resulting in 2-3x speed increase for our users depending on their distance, and we're working on adding 2 more by the end of this year. Every month, we fight against and mitigate \~5000 - 6000 various different threats on our systems and network. These are threats like brute-force attacks on accounts, bot signups, storage abuse, small-scale DDOS attack attempts and API abuse. Lately almost all the malicious traffic we had to deal with have been originating from Tor. Consequently, our users trying to access Cryptee via Tor have been facing additional security challenges. We're very sorry about this unpleasant situation, and would like you to know that we're working on better detection systems, improving our security measures, and taking small steps to improve Cryptee's performance on Tor. Please know that these measures are for your own security, and we're not enjoying combatting these threats either. ## Do you like our new features? Subscribe to one of our paid plans to upload as many documents and photos as you'd like! We have plans ranging all the way up to 2TBs of storage, and our smallest plan is cheaper than a cup of coffee, for 3€/mo. For the price of a cup of coffee, you can help us make the internet a safer and more private place, store your personal documents, journals, notes and private photos in our encrypted, private cloud storage service. ## Closing Notes This update also comes packed with long-overdue bug fixes, both for Docs and Photos, performance improvements and minor cosmetic upgrades. We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! These features wouldn't be possible without you and your feedback. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about our new features overall! Stay safe and all the very best from Northern Europe, On behalf of Team Cryptee, John ### Tags in Cryptee Photos! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/tagging-for-photos-is-here/ Last updated: 2021-04-24T15:34:58.000Z Since the day we launched Cryptee, many of you have been asking for a way to tag your photos! We've got some great news! Starting today, you can tag & search for your photos in Cryptee Photos, all privately & using natural language. We think this is huge! We know that many of you have been waiting for the ability to tag your photos to switch away from other cloud photo storage services to Cryptee Photos! The time has come! --- ## How does it work? First things first. **All your tags and photos are encrypted and private**. So we can't see them. Now keep that in mind, and be prepared to be mind blown. It's 2021\. We thought tagging should be as easy as typing out the tags in natural language. So we thought it would be amazing if you could tag your photos in Cryptee Photos the same way you tag your photos on Instagram or Twitter with hashtags. So all you have to do is select the photos you'd like to tag, press "tag" from the menu, and start typing your *#hashtags*, like this : ![Tagging Photos in Cryptee Photos](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/04/tagging-2.jpg) Cryptee will intelligently recognize your hashtags and make them all searchable. **Again, all this is encrypted, and all this magic happens on your device**. So we can't see your photos or tags, and no one else can either. To see how far we can push the limits of our new tagging system, we decided to test its limits with libraries that have 1,000,000+ photos. In case if you're curious, our search can still find photos in a few seconds. So tag away! ## Search by tags, albums, and natural language. In case if you didn't know, in Cryptee Photos you can search for your photos using natural language. For example, you can type "*photos I took in the morning of spring 2019*" into the search bar, and Cryptee will find all your photos taken during **morning-time** in **spring 2019**. (and don't worry if you live in the southern hemisphere, Cryptee will use the correct seasons) So obviously, we thought it would be amazing if you could search for tags in natural language too. So go ahead and type "*our #trip photos from two years ago*". Cryptee will find all photos from **2019**, photos that are tagged with **#trip,** and display the albums containing the photos to make it even easier to navigate when you have thousands of photos: ![Searching for Tagged Photos using Natural Language in Cryptee Photos](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/04/natural-language-search.jpg) ### Multiple Tags? No problem! You can search for up to 10 hashtags at the same time. So for example you can search for "*cool pics from #sweden or #norway or #denmark*", all using natural language and Cryptee will find all your photos tagged with *#sweden*, *#norway or #denmark.* ![Searching for Tagged Photos using Natural Language in Cryptee Photos](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/04/multi-tag.jpg) ### Not sure if you're looking for an album or a tag? No problem. Just type it like a hashtag. Let Cryptee figure out if it's an album or a tag you're looking for, even when there's both an album and a hashtag with the same name. ![Searching for Tagged Photos and Albums using Natural Language in Cryptee Photos](https://blog.crypt.ee/content/images/2021/04/multiple-results.jpg) ### But what about ghost albums? Don't worry! Tags are compatible with Ghost Albums. If you ghost an album containing tagged photos, and later search for those tags, Cryptee's search won't be able to find any photos tagged with those tags. So don't worry, your private photos will always be private on Cryptee! --- ## Migrate to Cryptee Photos If you're ready to migrate to Cryptee Photos from other cloud photo storage services, but don't know where to begin, don't worry! We've prepared step by step tutorials to help you move from other cloud photo storage services to Cryptee Photos. Take a look at our step-by-step tutorials to migrate your photos to Cryptee Photos from [Google Photos](https://crypt.ee/help?article=migrate-from-google-photos), [Amazon Photos](https://crypt.ee/help?article=migrate-from-amazon-photos), [iCloud Photos](https://crypt.ee/help?article=migrate-from-icloud-photos), and all [other apps](https://crypt.ee/help?article=how-can-i-bulk-import-my-photos-into-cryptee), in just a few simple clicks, and by dragging & dropping. ## Do you like our new features? Subscribe to one of our paid plans to upload as many photos as you'd like! We have plans ranging all the way up to 2TBs of storage, and our smallest plan is cheaper than a cup of coffee, for 3€/mo. For the price of a cup of coffee, you can help us make the internet a safer and more private place, and store your private photos in our encrypted, private cloud photos storage. ## Closing Notes This update also comes with a bunch of bug fixes and small performance improvements. We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! Neither Cryptee, nor any of these features would be possible without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan or by spreading the word. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about this update overall! Stay safe and all the very best from Northern Europe, Team Cryptee ### DOCX IN CRYPTEE DOCS URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/docx-in-cryptee-docs/ Last updated: 2021-03-24T10:59:25.000Z A mere 2 weeks after our fantastic version 3.0 launch, we're here again with some more great news. You can now natively open & edit .DOCX files in Cryptee Docs! And in case if you didn't notice, as of version 3.0 you can also save / export your Cryptee documents as .docx files. We think this is big, and it's going to be a huge win for privacy. ## 1\. SAVE STORAGE SPACE You no longer need to have Word™ or Google Docs™ on your phones to be able to open and edit docx files on the go. For example on iOS, Microsoft Word™ is 254.2mb, and Google Docs™ is 196mb. Whereas Cryptee is only \~10mb. ![word-docs-appstore.jpg](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/12/word-docs-appstore.jpg) So if you're looking for a way to save 200 - 250mb of storage space on your devices, this is a great way to start. ## 2\. OPEN / EDIT / SEND DOCX FILES QUICKLY & PRIVATELY If you have ever used Word™ on your phone to quickly open & edit a .docx file, then you must have seen the annoying "sign in to edit and save" popup – and perhaps thought to yourself as an iOS / Android user, "Wait ... Why do I have to sign up / sign in to Microsoft just to open / edit / save a word doc!?" – you're not alone. ![word-ios.jpg](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/12/word-ios.jpg) Starting today, as a Cryptee user, you can open, edit & save DOCX files in Cryptee Docs, on all your devices. No more of those annoying Microsoft™ sign-in / license expired pop-ups. Even as a free Cryptee Docs user you can open & edit docx files, and save your documents as docx files. ## 3\. OPEN DOCX FILES SAFELY A little known fact about docx files is that, due to the fact that they support macros, and other ways to execute code in them, they are commonly used by malicious third parties to distribute and spread malware viruses [(source)](https://threatpost.com/word-based-malware-attack-doesnt-use-macros/129969). Often malware and viruses are sent by unsuspecting co-workers or family members with infected computers, and all it takes for your computer to get infected with a malware like this is to open a docx file using Word™. Cryptee does not run / execute macros while opening docx files, allowing you to open / edit / save DOCX files safely, without having to worry about your computer getting infected. ## CAVEATS Docx is a 15+ year old format by Microsoft™, a 1.75 trillion dollar company, developed by thousands of engineers over the course of many years – whereas Cryptee is a tiny company with limited resources. Unfortunately, docx comes with a lot of quirks and complexity that makes it a very difficult format to work with. To deal with this complexity, most unencrypted services, convert docx files on their servers, since their servers can access your documents and files OR they utilize online services by Microsoft to convert your docx files to other formats, by first sending your documents to Microsoft [(source)](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/examples/document-conversion). At Cryptee, we believe that both of these approaches are unacceptable. On Cryptee all your documents and files are encrypted on your device, so our servers cannot access your files / documents, and therefore cannot assist with these format conversions. And we think it's outrageous to send your private documents to Microsoft to convert them. So instead, on Cryptee all your docx files are converted on your device, privately. As a side effect of this, although Cryptee is able to convert & open Word™ docx files, you may still experience compatibility issues. Like mis-formatted tables, missing colors, highlights, comments etc. Therefore, in order to prevent data-loss, Cryptee will generate a copy of your original file before opening / converting / importing docx files. This way, if something is missing, mis-formatted or not converted accurately, you won't lose the original file, nor its contents. While we are working around the clock to add more and more docx features to our editor, we thought it's best to release this feature as quickly as possible, and collect feedback from our community as we go. ## CLOSING NOTES This update also comes with a bunch of bug fixes and small performance improvements. We would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support! Neither Cryptee, nor any of these features would be possible without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan. Your payments help us make the internet that much more safer and private. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about this update overall! Stay safe and all the very best from Northern Europe, Team Cryptee ### SAY HELLO TO A NEW CRYPTEE URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/say-hello-to-a-new-cryptee/ Last updated: 2021-05-07T08:32:16.000Z Hello everyone! Today I'm so incredibly excited to announce Cryptee version 3.0. This is the biggest update to Cryptee ever since its launch years ago! We thought, if we could take all our users' feedback, all the years of our learnings & experiences running Cryptee, and could re-write the entire platform from ground-up, what would it look like? So we worked day & night, every day, for 18 months to answer this question. We've re-designed the entire platform, re-engineered everything from ground up, added hundreds of new features, and created an entirely new Cryptee experience for you. Along the way we've realized it's going to be a massive leap forward, so we thought we should get a new logo too. To put things into perspective, that's 2% of my entire life spent working on this update, so I am beyond excited and happy to be sharing this big update with you. So without further ado, let's talk about the new Cryptee. Grab a cup of coffee, and settle in. This will be a long read. ## A NEW DESIGN First things first. Cryptee has a whole new beautiful look. I'll let these pictures speak for themselves. ![Cryptee Docs & Photos](https://alfa.crypt.ee/imgs/hero/cryptee-photos-docs-hero.jpg) ![Cryptee Docs Desktop](https://alfa.crypt.ee/imgs/hero/cryptee-docs-grid.jpg) We've spent months studying what makes document editors or photo galleries great, and obsessed over the little design details. Perhaps spent an unhealthy amount of time pushing pixels around. But I personally think it was worth it. Once you experience the new Cryptee, I'm confident that you'll appreciate some of these subtle details. We made Docs' user interface design more icon-based, and Photos's design more text-based, so that the user interface's text won't distract you while you're typing, or other graphic icons won't add noise to your photos viewing experience. Although we've kept things familiar, we've changed literally everything, and there's a massive list of big changes at the end of this article, but as far as design changes go, here are my personal favorites so far: --- ### NEW SIDEBAR On mobile you can swipe open / close the sidebar and access your documents more smoothly than ever, in 60fps. You can now pin the sidebar to keep it open, and the editor will update its layout to work just the way you'd expect. Oh and we got rid of that annoying feature where moving your mouse left would open the sidebar. Instead, you can either click a button, or swipe/scroll your mouse left / right to open & close the sidebar. Give it a try, we think you'll love it. ![Cryptee Docs Desktop & Mobile](https://alfa.crypt.ee/imgs/hero/cryptee-docs-duo.jpg) Here's how the sidebar looks like when you pin it. ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/new-sidebar.jpg) And here's how your documents / files look like inside your folders, when grouped by their extensions. ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/sidebar-docs.jpg) ### NEW MENUS And of course, we've updated our menus. We thought to ourselves, why does the "File / Edit / View / History etc" menu have to be on the top? Why not move it to the right side of the document. And so we did just that. You can now perform tons of new actions on your open documents using the menus on the right. Here's how they look like : ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/new-menus.jpg) ### FULL DARK MODE Perhaps you've noticed in the images above. Cryptee Docs now has a full dark-mode document editor. ### NEW PDF & EPUB VIEWER We went ahead and created a hot new PDF & EPUB viewer that looks better than ever. Here's how the full dark mode & our new PDF / EPUB viewer looks like: ![Cryptee Docs (Picture-in-Picture)](https://alfa.crypt.ee/imgs/hero/cryptee-docs-pip.jpg) ### A WHOLE NEW PHOTOS GALLERY The photos gallery is now faster than ever! We've improved our timeline, and changed the way albums and photos look like. Your albums and photos now look bigger than before, and you can scroll through / navigate your photos so much more faster. On devices with high-screen refresh rates you can scroll as fast as your eyes can catch up with a 60fps scroll, and on tablets you can swipe your finger over the timeline to navigate your photos! We think you'll love it! ![Cryptee Photos Desktop](https://alfa.crypt.ee/imgs/hero/cryptee-photos-1.jpg) ![Cryptee Photos Desktop](https://alfa.crypt.ee/imgs/hero/cryptee-photos-2.jpg) You can now edit your albums, their names and dates easily. ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/album-view.jpg) ### NEW KEY & LOGIN SCREENS Our key and login screens are now more dramatic than ever. We've curated hundreds of new photos for your viewing pleasure to make you feel even more at home. ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/key-screens.jpg) ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/new-login.jpg) --- ### NEW HELPDESK We've re-designed and improved our helpdesk based on your feedback, and added tutorials, migrations guides, and tons of new helpdesk articles to help you find what you're looking for right away! ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/helpdesk-v3.jpg) We can spend hours talking about the new design, and our new landing page, signup page, checkout page, account settings page, and new everything, but perhaps it's best that you explore and discover some of it yourself. In the interest of keeping this update concise, moving on to the most exciting part of this update. All the new features. ## NEW FEATURES --- The list is massive, and there's no easy way to list all the new features. Because we've added hundreds of them. Team and I spent 2 days drafting this article, and eventually I decided to keep it simple. So here's a giant list of our favorites, and features we think you've been waiting for, as well as a few videos to show off how fast Cryptee's apps are now. – A print-compatible, full dark-mode for Cryptee Docs. – All new sidebar – New ways to open the sidebar (swipe / click / scroll) – Pinned sidebar – Instant start / sync under 2-3 seconds (more on this below in the performance section) – Ability to start directly into Docs or Photos on mobile devices to save time, – Ability to remember your key on mobile devices to save even more time. – Cryptee can now start directly into Docs in about 2-3 seconds. (more on this below in the performance section) – If you background Cryptee on your phones, and switch back/forth from other apps, Cryptee now starts instantly. – All files & folder names are always available offline, even if they're not available offline – A quicker and more refined offline editing & file management experience – Instant new documents with an all new, easy to access "New Document" button – A better archive folders mechanism – A new and faster way to move files & folders – New dropdown and right-click menus – Better folders navigation – A quick 'open containing folder' button, so you can open a document or file's containing folder. – You can now see your folders' colors in recent documents view to find your documents faster – New 'document info' menu – New 'document tools' menu – New 'document actions' menu – New table of contents menu – An even better & cleaner viewing-mode – A faster spell-checker you can quickly turn on / off for each document – Better warning messages for critical actions – A much faster & better PDF viewer and EPUB ebook reader. – An improved picture-in-picture PDF & EPUB viewer – A better side-by-side view for PDF / EPUB viewer – Font size & light/dark mode options for the ebook reader – Faster tag creation & search – Faster inline attachments & links – Better looking inline attachments, links and tags – A better "visit url" box for mobile devices – The "visit url" box now displays a warning if the URL is suspicious or not secure – Improved Markdown Exports and Github Flavored Markdown support! You can now export your Cryptee Documents as markdown files and keep your checklists, nested bullet-lists, nested check-lists and even tables. – Improved Word Exports! You can now export your Cryptee Documents as 'docx' files and keep your tables & have better looking pages – Improved HTML Exports! You can now export your Cryptee Documents as html files, and have better looking checklists, nested bullet lists, nested checklists and even tables. – Improved Markdown & HTML importers with tables support! We think this is big! You can now import large and complex tables in a breeze! – A much better Evernote importer with tables, inline PDFs, audio-memos, attachments, tags! – When importing entire Evernote notebooks, Cryptee now creates a folder for each notebook, and places your notes/documents in these folders. – Imported evernote notes are now instantly converted to Cryptee documents while importing, and are now 10x faster. – Imported evernote notes' tags are now Cryptee-compatible and search-able. – We think this update brings 100% Evernote cross-compatibility, so please give it a try and let us know if you run into any issues during imports, we're aiming to make this move as easy and as painless as possible. – Safe imports from other applications! We've detected that apps like Evernote have some security & privacy vulnerabilities in the way they keep your notes / documents if you've ever pasted content from the web. More on this below in the "security & privacy updates" section. – Safer clipboard & copy/pasting from other applications, and tracker warnings. More on this below in the "security & privacy updates" section. – You can now ghost nested folder structures! – Search in Cryptee Docs & Photos is about 3x faster. – You can now edit your album dates manually – A whole new helpdesk with tons of new articles and migration guides. – New sign in and key screens – A new account settings page – A whole new landing page, – New home screen – A new signup page – Improved censorship circumvention in high-risk areas. More on this below in the "security & privacy updates" section. – You can now select multiple files & photos to upload using Firefox on Android. (yep this used to be an Android Firefox bug – thankfully the great folks @ Mozilla fixed it) And hundreds more that we can't possibly fit in this article, because this list is already way too long to read. So let's talk about some of these security, privacy and performance updates in detail now. ## SECURITY & PRIVACY UPDATES ### COPY/PASTE TRACKER WARNINGS We've noticed that an alarmingly high number of websites started to employ pixel-trackers in their image content, by means of adding meta-information to their image links. Sadly, much like tracking pixels in emails, these remote images can be (and are being) used to track you by the server owners. What's more is that we've discovered that when you copy-paste images from websites into other applications, remote images get carried over as a side-effect of how copy-pasting works on all operating systems. And sadly, we realized most apps don't watch out for these remote trackers / links. (for example ... evernote ...!) Since remote images make connections to remote servers every time you open a document, the remote images' servers (and their owners) can track: - when & how often you open a document with the pasted image, - the location where you open a document using your ip address - the device with which you open a document (phone/laptop etc) We think that's absurd, unacceptable and a gross violation of your privacy. Starting with this version, when you copy paste anything into Cryptee, or when you import 3rd party files like html, markdown, or evernote notes into Cryptee, Cryptee will scan for remote images, block them from loading, and ask if you'd like to load them. In case if you're wondering how bad the situation is... For example, if you copy paste anything from LinkedIn, like the name and the profile picture of someone, here's how many pictures are loaded remotely form LinkedIn that can be used to track you. ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/secure-paste.jpg) We know that this will make copy pasting harder for some of you, and may make some documents look ugly with the big yellow warning box. But don't worry. You can of course allow loading these images, with a single click if you'd like to, and Cryptee will still continue to display subtle warnings to remind you about these images when you open the document's info box, like this : ![](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/11/insecure-image-popup.jpg) ### EVEN LESS DATA COLLECTION In the past, to be able to start quickly, and present to you the user interface as quickly as possible Cryptee had to store a few pieces of information un-encrypted, like your language direction preference (i.e. "right-to-left" for languages like Hebrew or Arabic, or "left-to-right" for most western languages), your spell-checker settings for Docs ("on" / "off"), or your auto-lock timeout preference in minutes (like "30"). We didn't like that we had to keep these pieces of information un-encrypted, even with the best intentions at heart. So we've re-engineered the way our editor works, and as of this version, Cryptee stores these locally on your device, and doesn't sync these across your devices, however inconvenient it may be. We think it was a worthy tradeoff, and thanks to these improvements we'll know even less about your use of Cryptee than we did before. ### MORE PRIVATE HELPDESK Cryptee is incorporated, engineered and designed to provide you the ultimate privacy and security and every part of our system is designed around this. Most web services rely on third party platforms like zendesk for their customer support. To make sure that even your customer support interactions remain private on cryptee, we built our own customer support system. So all your customer service interactions with us will happen on our own platform now. Needless to say we don't have any analytics, cookies or trackers anywhere either. ### IMPROVED CENSORSHIP CIRCUMVENTION We think privacy and security is a human right, and we think you should have a right to privacy no matter where you live. Increasingly more and more nation states seem to disagree with this idea. So we thought it's best that we improve our censorship circumvention mechanisms a bit. Just in case. For reasons you can understand, I won't be discussing the specific improvements we made, but suffice to say that we've spent approximately 2 - 3 months working on these changes, improving our server availability, adding fall-back servers for higher-risk regions globally, and making sure our infrastructure can survive different censorship techniques. When it comes to nation-state level acts of censorship, there really isn't a perfect solution, and we can only try as hard as we can, and hope for the best. But we think privacy is one of the greatest causes worth fighting for. We hope that this update will make Cryptee accessible to even more people around the world, so that they too can have a safe and private home on the internet. ## PERFORMANCE UPDATES Now let's talk about some more fun stuff. ### QUICK STARTUP Many of you have requested a way to launch Cryptee and jump straight into Cryptee Docs to save time or to take a quick note on your mobile devices. We've re-engineered our entire app with performance and quicker-startup times in mind, and I'm happy to say that you can now jump into Cryptee Docs almost instantly, all under 2-3 seconds. Here's a rather cheaply produced video to show you what I mean : Your browser does not support the video tag ### SCROLL IMPROVEMENTS In addition to the quick startup times, many of you have requested us to work on our scroll-smoothness. Perhaps you noticed in poorly and quickly shot video above. We did just that. You can now scroll through your documents and photos as fast as 60 frames per second, or as fast as your device's screen can refresh. ### LARGER PHOTO ALBUMS & TABLES In addition to improving our app's overall performance, we've also made tweaks to how our editor handles large tables. In the past our editor used to slow down if you had \~500 rows in a table. Now, even mid-range devices should be able to handle tables as massive as 10,000 rows in your documents. Similarly, we've improved the way our photo gallery works. Even mid range devices should be able to handle albums with photos as much as 50,000\. For best performance, we do however still recommend keeping your album-sizes under 10,000 photos when possible. ## OTHER CHANGES ### HOME DOCUMENTS We're slowly getting rid of "Home Documents". After 2 years of testing this feature, we've realized this feature caused more confusion and frustration than it helped, so we decided to get rid of this feature slowly. In the interest of backwards-compatibility, to help make the transition easier for you, we didn't want to get rid of the feature entirely right away. If you actively use your "Home Document", it will now appear as a regular document among your recent documents, and will always show up in your recent documents list no matter how old it is, with a special home icon next to it. If you don't have any use for your Home Document, and would simply prefer for it to go away, you can now move home documents to other folders (just like any other file or document), or delete them altogether, both of which you couldn't do before. Needless to say, don't worry. We've prepared Cryptee with a great level of backwards compatibility in mind and if you prefer you can continue to use your Home Documents for many more years to come. Home Documents will be a little bit less convenient than they used to be – but we promise, we've got amazing features in the horizon to make up for this difference. ### COUNTLESS BUG FIXES We've fixed around 400 bugs with this release. We think this version of Cryptee addresses most of the major bugs we've experienced in the past year. But software development is a strangely difficult thing where fixing one bug can sometimes cause another. Needless to say if you run into any bugs / errors / issues, please reach out to us from our helpdesk, and we'll fix it all up right away! Now that the new version of Cryptee is out, we promise we'll be quicker to address your feature requests & bugfixes. ## CLOSING NOTES After a crazy, dumpsterfire of a year like 2020, full of sad news about the pandemic, climate, world politics and more, some of you have reached out to ask how our team is doing, whether if team Cryptee is safe & sound, and if the company is doing well. To those of you who reached out, THANK YOU! You are amazing, and the world needs more kindhearted people like you. Our team has always been mostly remote, and we've normally spent very little time in our offices. So the pandemic or working from home didn't really change our workflow, other than the fact that our favorite coffee shop had to close its doors for a few months. We've had an otherwise perfectly healthy and calm pandemic, mostly thanks to people being naturally-locked down and socially-distant with temperatures as low as –30°C outside. That being said, due to the pandemic, and perhaps more people working from home, more people started using Cryptee. Between February and July 2020, our userbase has grown at a staggering rate of up to +10%/week. To be able to catch up with the rapid growth, we grew our support & accounting teams, added two new datacenters to our platform and bought tons of new servers. Finally, I would like to thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support during these tough times we're living in. Neither Cryptee, nor any of these features would be possible without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan. Every payment helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. We hope you'll enjoy this update as much as we do, and we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas, feature requests, bug reports and what you think about this update overall! Stay safe and all the very best from Northern Europe, John ### Tables, Helpdesk 2.0 and more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/tables-helpdesk-2-0-and-more/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:46:12.000Z Hello Everyone! A new version of Cryptee is out! This version brings the most anticipated feature everyone's been asking for! Tables! After almost a year of development and testing, we're so excited to announce that you can now create tables in your Cryptee Docs! In typical Cryptee fashion, we didn't want to stop there for this update. We've also created a whole new helpdesk, and many other improvements to our service! Let's dive right in! ![TABLES](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/10/tables.jpg) ## TABLES IN CRYPTEE DOCS You can now create tables in your Cryptee Documents! Before we talk about what took us so long, let's first take a look at how Tables work! Once you click on the New Table button in the editor's toolbar, you will be presented with a picker, where you can quickly choose the number of columns & rows you'd like to start your table with. ![NEW TABLE](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/10/new-table.jpg) Don't worry, after creating your table you can easily insert more new rows & columns. Making additions / changes to your table is also one click away. Simply press the dropdown button, and you can quickly remove/add rows & columns. We've even added some color-coded highlighting to make working with tables a breeze, and easier than other editors out there! ![DELETE TABLE ROW](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/10/delete-row.jpg) ![INSERT TABLE ROW](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/10/insert-row.jpg) And that's tables! You might be rightfully wondering what took us so long. Well, turns out building a rich-text editor that supports tables is complicated. REALLY complicated. We had to re-code and prepare each and every text editor feature from scratch to make this happen. Think every combination and permutation of every single formatting feature. Anything you can think of, bold, italic, underline etc, we had to test it all out to make sure they can work compatibly with tables. And we had to test thousands of scenarios to make sure tables won't break or error out. Scenarios like : Paste a link into a table, make it half bold, half italic, select it all then make it 48pt, would it break the table? What should happen if you paste a bullet list onto a link that's in a table? What if you copy the table and paste it onto another table with lots of styling? etc. etc. You got the idea! So we bought ourselves a big espresso maker last year, and started working around the clock to account for these types of scenarios and ensure that tables work on all browsers without issues. You may have noticed in the screenshots above that we had to disable all block-level editor features, to ensure tables can't/won't accidentally break. ![DISABLED TABLE FEATURES](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/10/table-features-disabled.jpg) So for example, you can't add math formulas, insert embedded videos, or write long blocks of code, or add long checklists into tables. This is because features like these are treated differently by each browser, (for example video players work differently on each browser) and it's going to take us a bit longer to introduce these features. But we thought this is a good start for launching tables! This also meant that we had to re-write our markdown shortcut engine, to make sure these features won't accidentally get triggered in tables. For example, normally if you start a line with "-" our markdown engine will automatically turn the line into a bullet list item. However, in tables bullet lists aren't supported, but also you may simply wish to write something like "- €1000" in a table cell. And that's yet another reason why it took us a long time to bring tables to Cryptee Docs. Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, you might be wondering... Yes, all the keyboard shortcuts you're familiar with from other editor applications, like navigating the table with arrow keys, or tab to jump to the next cell are all supported in Cryptee, and they work on all operating systems, including tablets like iPad. Finally, if you're using a right-to-left (RTL) language, Cryptee tables support all RTL languages as well. Best of all, we've made it so that RTL is supported at cell-level, and not just at table-level. (unlike Google Docs for example) So if you're learning a new RTL language, and would like to have a vocabulary list, you can have a left-to-right language on one column, and a right-to-left language on another column. Best of all, all keyboard shortcuts will automatically invert and work in the correct direction. (So for example, tab key will jump RTL, instead of LTR, you got the idea!) Needless to say while we are confident in our tests and we've tested tables against thousands of different scenarios, there's still a non-zero chance that browser extensions or unexpected keyboard-shortcut differences between operating systems & browsers could potentially cause issues. If you do run into any issues, please reach out to our support with your operating system, browser configuration and the exact steps you took. We'll fix it up right away! One caveat. For now, our tables aren't DOCX or Markdown compatible, due to all the additional features Cryptee's text editor supports. We're still working on the cross-compatibility layer and eventually we'll add support for them. ## APP PERFORMANCE For the past few months, Cryptee's userbase has been growing at an unprecedented +5-7%/week rate, and our team has been working around the clock to ensure service stability. We've made some performance improvements to our servers & apps, reduced their response times, and managed to make our server connections 30% faster overall. ## A NEW HELPDESK EXPERIENCE With great userbase growth comes great helpdesk responsibility! After hearing out our new users' stories and their onboarding experience with Cryptee overall, we've realized the biggest pain point for most of our new users is migrating their content from un-encrypted services to Cryptee. So we thought it's time to redesign and improve our helpdesk. We've added tons of new helpdesk articles, added more popular questions & answers, improved our search so that you can easily find the answer you're looking for, and most importantly, we've created new migration tutorials to help you move your data from old unencrypted apps to Cryptee. Here's how it looks like : ![NEW HELPDESK](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/10/new-helpdesk.jpg) ## IMPROVEMENTS / 2K & 4K DISPLAY SUPPORT FOR PHOTOS Some of our professional photographer users have reached out to us and mentioned that they have 2K or 4K monitors, and would love to see more albums on their large monitors, and higher resolution album thumbnails. They've also mentioned that Cryptee wasn't detecting the correct EXIF dates for photos that were edited in professional photo editing applications like Lightroom or Capture One. So, we've spent some time, did the math, and made it all possible. With Cryptee, and its on-device encryption, all photos & thumbnails you see on your monitor first need to be decrypted before they can be displayed. Due to this, displaying 2x more large album thumbnails mean 2x more processing power & memory usage. So to make this possible, over the course of the last two months, we've improved our thumbnail - decryption process, and made it so that at least 8 albums' thumbnails can be decrypted simultaneously, with no additional usability impact, by decrypting album thumbnails using multiple processors. The result? If you have a large monitor, you can now see 2x more albums on your screen than before! Here's how they will look like : ![PHOTOS HD ALBUMS](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/10/photos-2k-albums.jpg) In addition, we've improved the range of EXIF tags Cryptee can recognize. Now even if a photo is edited or processed using professional photo editing applications like Lightroom or Capture One, Cryptee will always pick the correct photo-taken date, instead of the photo-last-saved date, to make it easier to sort large collections of photoshoot sessions, and find the photo you're looking for. ## Other Improvements, Bugfixes & Closing Notes This update also fixes hundreds of bugs, brings mini user-experience and other various speed & performance improvements. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. Neither Cryptee, nor any of these features would be possible without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan. Every payment helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. ### Natural Language Search, EPub / Ebook Support, Undo history settings and more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/natural-language-search-epub-ebook-support-undo-history-settings-and-more/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:45:11.000Z Hello Everyone! Cryptee's new version is out, and it's packed with fantastic and exciting new features many of you have been eagerly looking forward to! Intelligent Natural Language Search for Photos, iOS 13.4 Mouse & Trackpad support, Epub/Ebook support for Cryptee Docs, Sorting files by types, 45% smaller app, 4K display support, Docs undo history settings, and more! ![PHOTOS NATURAL LANGUAGE SEARCH](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/9/natural-language-search.jpg) ## INTELLIGENT NATURAL-LANGUAGE SEARCH FOR CRYPTEE PHOTOS It's always a difficult challenge to find the exact photo you're looking for. Searching for filenames or album-names is good for basic use, and takes time, but what if you're looking for something specific? Something you took at night in the summer of 2016, or a photo you know you took 4 months ago in the afternoon. I'm proud to say you can now search for your encrypted photos, just the way you think. In plain, natural language, and Cryptee will find you what you're looking for. Best part of it is that, since all your photos are encrypted on your device, all this language recognition magic happens on your device, without any servers involved, in complete privacy, just the way you'd expect from Cryptee. So how does it work? All you need to do, is simply type whatever you're thinking and looking for. Like: "photos from spring 2019", "photos I took in the morning of spring 2019" "two years ago in march" "something I took in december 2016 in the afternoon" "last year in april" "pics from 4 weeks ago" "morning photos from 2015" "photos I took in the last month" etc. You got the idea! Do you live in the southern hemisphere? Thinking: "But wait a second, summer here is winter in the northern hemisphere... How does Cryptee know the difference?" When you type a season into the search bar, like "summer", "winter" etc, Cryptee checks your device's local timezone (i.e. "Australia/Brisbane"), and intelligently picks seasons for the correct hemisphere you're in at the moment of the search. All on your device, in complete privacy, without any servers involved. So if you're a fan of vegemite, don't worry! Let's see how it works in action! Your browser does not support the video tag. For the time being this feature is limited to searches in English only, but in the upcoming months, you can expect support for other languages. ## IOS & IPAD OS 13.4, MOUSE & TRACKPAD SUPPORT In the upcoming days, Apple is going to release iOS/iPad OS 13.4 for iPads, allowing you to connect a bluetooth mouse or trackpad to your iPad, and use your tablet just like a laptop. I'm happy to say that this update of Cryptee brings support for mice & trackpads on iPads, even before Apple's ready to release the new operating system. You can use all the mouse/trackpad gestures you're used to from Cryptee's desktop version on your iPad now. Such as hovering your pointer to the left side of the screen to quickly access your Documents & Folders, Or right clicking on documents/folders/files and renaming them. Or selecting text and making it bold etc. Here's how it works! Your browser does not support the video tag. ## EPUB / EBOOK SUPPORT FOR CRYPTEE DOCS In the long history of censorship and oppression, perhaps the oldest form of censorship is banning and burning books. Throughout history, and even today, governments all around the world ban and censor books. Today, I'm proud to make history and announce the first encrypted e-book reader. You can now upload and read your EPUB e-books on Cryptee Docs. All encrypted on your device, all in complete privacy, just the way you'd expect from Cryptee. Cryptee automatically tracks your progress in the book, and syncs across your devices instantly. You can even refer to your books, side by side with your documents. ![Cryptee Encrypted Ebooks](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/9/epub-viewer.jpg) You can also bookmark pages with one click, and your bookmarks will be sync'ed across all your devices instantly. ![Cryptee Encrypted Ebooks Bookmarks](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/9/epub-bookmarks.jpg) You can also access the table of contents of the book, and navigate to another page quickly with one click. ![Cryptee Encrypted Ebooks Table of Contents](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/9/epub-toc.jpg) And of course, on your tablet or phone, the reader fills the whole screen, so you can read your favorite book privately and comfortably with a cup of coffee. ![Cryptee Encrypted Ebooks iPad Coffee](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/9/epub-coffee.jpg) Two caveats. 1 - For the time being ebooks are only available while Cryptee Docs is online, (due to how attachments / files other than Cryptee Documents are handled in the app) but we're rapidly working on making ebooks available offline, and we're hoping to have this feature ready in a month or two. 2 - EPUB is a very complex format to display with tons and tons of vendor-specific quirks. We are confident that our reader will work well for 99.9% of the books out there. But due to the nature of EPUB files, there is a small possibility that you may experience formatting issues with some books. If you run into any issues, reach out to us via our helpdesk. We'll fix things up. ## FILETYPE SORT In addition to 'filename' & 'last-edited time', you can now sort your documents and files by 'filetype'. Allowing you to find what you're looking for much faster in folders. ![Cryptee Docs Filetype Sort](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/9/sort-by-type.jpg) ## APP PERFORMANCE & INSTALL SIZE We've been hard at work at making Cryptee more performant on all devices. A fresh install of Cryptee used to be \~11.2MB. After many hours of carefully re-factoring our code and hundreds of cups of coffee later, Cryptee is now \~6.1MB. That's correct. The app is now \~45% smaller. (This includes all the new features of this update) The installation size decrease means faster installation times, faster performance on slower devices (especially on Android Go) and more priceless room on your devices. But most importantly, and best of all, you'll notice that Docs and Photos will now start 1 - 2 seconds faster! ## 2K & 4K DISPLAY SUPPORT FOR PHOTOS Cryptee Photos now supports 2K and 4K displays. If you have a high resolution display, you can now see larger & higher-resolution album thumbnails, and more photos in your grids. Unlike traditional responsive-web-development, this was quite a complex challenge for Cryptee. Due to the fact that all images & thumbnails you see on your screen first have to be decrypted in memory, Cryptee has to intelligently calculate how many images can be displayed on the screen before the device / browser runs out of memory. More images = more decryption = more memory & processing power. After last month's multi-threaded decryption update, we've decided it's time to make Cryptee Photos shine on 2K and 4K displays. ## DOCS UNDO HISTORY SETTING Some of you have mentioned that the number of undo history steps Cryptee Docs offered was limiting. You can now set the number of undo steps you'd like Cryptee to remember. ## Other Improvements, Bugfixes & Closing Notes This update also fixes 100+ bugs, a major one being: uploads to Cryptee using Firefox is now a lot more reliable even under bad network conditions. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. Neither Cryptee, nor any of these features would be possible without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting it by upgrading to a paid plan. It will help Cryptee immensely, and every payment helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. ### Sub-Folders, Photos Timeline, Faster Encryption / Decryption & more! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/sub-folders-photos-timeline-faster-encryption-decryption-more/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:43:52.000Z Hello Everyone! After a fantastic, cold and productive Northern European winter, it's time for a big Cryptee update! Cryptee's new version is out, and it's packed with features many of you have been eagerly waiting for! ![SUBFOLDERS](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/subfolders.jpg) ## SUB-FOLDERS The oldest and most requested feature for Cryptee Docs is finally here! You can now create subfolders / folders within folders, nest your folders as many layers deep as you wish, and of course, move files and folders into other folders & sub-folders. So you can now have folder trees like Clients > Client #1 > Project ABC > Document, and can move the folder "Project ABC" to Completed Projects > Client #1 etc. Needless to say, sub-folders sync across all your devices instantly, all end-to-end encrypted. Just the way you'd expect from Cryptee. ![Cryptee Docs Subfolders](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/docs-subs-1.png) This was one of the most challenging and difficult features to bring to life with Cryptee's on-device encryption. On Cryptee, in addition to your files' contents, your filenames and folder-names are also all encrypted on your device. This meant engineering a way to create a folder-tree structure, without being able to see the folder-names themselves. All while making sure your changes to foldernames & filenames are synchronized between your devices in real-time in an end-to-end encrypted way. So on the servers, folders look completely unreadable like this : SbxYU2gBqH > OF4hDEGXB2 > qGmykB3BuY > UYfjvh7t2T.crypteefile ## PHOTOS TIMELINE One of the most requested features for Cryptee Photos is finally here! Cryptee Photos now has a Timeline Scroller! You can now quickly scroll to a specific year / month / day or alphabetic letter using the timeline on the right side of your screen. Here's how the years & months timeline looks like when your photos are sorted by date : ![Cryptee Photos Timeline Years](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/photos-scroll-year.png) Timeline follows the preferred sort order you've selected, and intelligently picks the best available representation for your photos and albums. Such as Year & Month, Months & Days, Days Only or A-Z. Here's how it looks like with Months & Days : ![Cryptee Photos Timeline Months](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/photos-scroll-months.jpg) And here's how it looks like when your photos are sorted A to Z. ![Cryptee Photos Timeline A-Z](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/photos-scroll-name.jpg) ## FASTER, PARALLEL ENCRYPTION & DECRYPTION + GPU UTILIZATION Cryptee can now encrypt/decrypt things up to 16x faster by utilizing all available processors of your device. For example if your phone has a Snapdragon 855 with 8 processor cores, you can expect encryption & decryption to be about 8x faster. The speed increase is going to be noticable especially in Cryptee Photos. In the past Cryptee had to decrypt all photos' thumbnails using the same processor, but now it can decrypt each thumbnail on a separate core, allowing thumbnails to load up to 8x faster for devices with 8 processors. (or 12x faster with 12 cores! You got the idea!) In addition, while uploading, your photos will be encrypted much faster due to being encrypted in parallel, rather than one-by-one. This also means, for users with 1000+ documents, Cryptee Docs will start up a few seconds faster than before. Finally, this update moves more tasks to your device's GPU, and allows the CPU to get some rest when possible. When you graph it up here's how all this looks like : ![Cryptee Photos Multithreading](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/photos-multithread.jpg) ## OTHER CHANGES & UPDATES Now that sub-folders have arrived to Cryptee Docs, a few things had to move around to make room for new features. Open folders now have a "New Folder" button, in addition to the "New Document", "Upload File" & "Sort" buttons, so that you can quickly create new folders inside your folders. ![Cryptee Docs New Folder](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/docs-subs-2.jpg) Cryptee Docs now has a "Heading 3" button, allowing for 3 layers of heading-styling. ![Cryptee Docs H3](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/docs-h3.jpg) You can now quickly move the active/open document from the contextual menu. ![Cryptee Docs Move](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/8/docs-move.jpg) ## Other Improvements, Bugfixes & Closing Notes This update also fixes \~400 bugs and comes packed with lots of cosmetic improvements. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. Neither Cryptee, nor any of these features would be possible without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting it by upgrading to a paid plan. It will help Cryptee immensely, and every payment helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. ### Favorite Photos, .Docx Files & More! URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/favorite-photos-docx-files-more/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:42:49.000Z After a long, dark and productive Northern European autumn, just like the northern lights, Cryptee's new version is out, packed with tons of new features. ![favorites](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/favorites.jpg) ## Favorite Photos Perhaps the most requested feature for Cryptee Photos, the ability to favorite photos is finally here. You can now mark your most treasured moments with one click, and revisit your favorite moments from your "favorites" album. ![favorite](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/fav.png) Favorites album displays your photos larger than other albums, and we made a few optimizations to ensure your favorite photos load much faster than usual. ![favorites-album](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/favorites-album.png) We've received lots of feedback from you regarding the organizational flow of Cryptee Photos, how creating new albums take a lot of time, or downloading entire albums require selecting all photos, and how all this can be much faster. You can now create new albums a lot faster and easier, and also download entire albums all with a single click. ![new-album](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/new-album.png) In preparation of some fantastic new upcoming features, Cryptee Photos also has a new uploader that is faster, more memory efficient and sleek! ![uploader](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/uploader.png) While working on all these visual updates, we thought it's time to update all pop-up prompts and modals. They were boxy and looked outdated. So now all pop-up modals across all Cryptee services are more space-efficient and look more modern. ![modals](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/modals.png) In addition to the features we've listed above, you can now pinch or double tap to zoom into your photos to see them bigger, search photos faster, and organize albums a lot quicker. ## Fan of MS Word™? Cryptee Docs now supports exporting your documents to MS Word™ .docx files. Please note that, due to the immense complexity involved with rich text editors and docx being a propriatery format, this feature is currently "beta", and some things may not work or look perfect. Also note that many Cryptee-specific features will not be present in your documents, like checkboxes, attached files, embedded videos math etc. We're going to keep working hard to bring more of these features to our exporter. ![docx](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/docx.png) You can now attach your files & documents or embed your images to other documents all from the file explorer and search, simply by right clicking or tapping on the file's contextual dropdown. ![embed](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/embed.png) ![attach](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/7/attach.png) ## Other Improvements, Bugfixes & Closing Notes This update also fixes hundreds of bugs and brings tons of long overdue cosmetic improvements. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. We wouldn't be able to do this without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting it by upgrading to a paid plan. It will help Cryptee immensely, and every payment helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. ### A Dark Autumn Update URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/a-dark-autumn-update/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:41:32.000Z In Northern Europe, where Cryptee is based, very soon days will start getting darker and darker to a point where there are mere few hours of sunlight left for each day. This update prepares Cryptee for the dark nordic winter ahead. ![dark-mode](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/6/darkmode-banner.jpg) ## Dark Mode. Finally. That's right. All Cryptee apps now support Dark Mode. If you're a night owl, or simply wish to join the dark side, you can now do that. Head over to Settings > App Preferences, and join the dark side! Today Apple will release iOS 13, and if you've already downloaded the new operating system, you're in luck! Cryptee will follow iOS 13's new system dark mode theme and dark-mode preferences. So while Cryptee is open, if you change your iOS device's theme to Dark Mode / Light Mode from your Control Center, Cryptee will follow along and automatically match your system's theme. Enough said. Here are some screenshots! ![photos-dark-mode](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/6/photos-dark-mode.png) ![docs-dark-mode](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/6/docs-dark-mode.png) ![docs-dark-mode-2](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/6/docs-dark-mode-2.png) ## Search just got better. Cryptee Docs now has an even more advanced Search. Search will now return much better and more relevant results, categorize them by tags, and even show you folders. You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard and press return to quickly open the results. Or select multiple documents by clicking on their icons, and take actions on multiple results. And even right click on any of your search results, documents or folders to take all sorts of actions. Your browser does not support the video tag. ## Improved File & PDF Viewer The attachment viewer in Cryptee Docs is now faster with larger PDF files, and it's got a face-lift. You can now open much more complex PDF documents, search pages for text content in the open PDFs, see all pages, chapters, print just the PDF, see the PDF full screen, or more. Here's how it looks like! ![new-pdf-viewer](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/6/new-pdf.png) ## Docs Performance. This update brings massive performance improvements to Cryptee Docs, especially to cold start-up times. This update improves cold start-up times by 10x to 100x depending on how many documents / files you have, and introduces new settings to further tune your Cryptee Docs performance according to your needs. Here's how we managed to achieve these speed improvements. In the past Cryptee Docs used to decrypt *all* filenames, folder-names and document names during start-up, which was why cold start-ups were slow. After asking a large portion of our beta users & pro users with thousands of documents, we've discovered that almost everyone seems to access documents & files newer than 6 months. And everyone agreed that it's okay to wait an extra second to decrypt a bunch of filenames if the documents or files are older than 6 months. So starting with this update, Cryptee will only decrypt the filenames of your folders and most recent documents. All other / older filenames will be decrypted when you open the folders containing them. This will result in a second or two lost while opening folders containing files older than a few months, but after beta testing this feature for a month, we've measured that, every day, on average, this will save you a minute or two in total. In short, while folders with older files will take an extra second or two to load, everything else will load much more faster. We also didn't want to be the authority to decide what's "recent", since we know that "recent" can mean a lot of things. 1 month, 6 months or even a year. So you can now adjust how far back you'd like your "Recent Documents" to go from your Docs Preferences from your Account Settings. Needless to say the shorter your timeframe is, the faster Cryptee Docs will start. ## Markdown Export. Many of you have been requesting a way to export your documents to Markdown format. This update makes that possible. Well... Kind of... Markdown as a format have lots of shortcomings. It doesn't natively support many of Cryptee's features, like tags, linking/attaching to other documents, or even things like custom colors, KaTeX math and a few other things. Therefore when you export a Cryptee Document as a Markdown file, all these will be lost. So we thought it's best to label this feature "Beta" for the time being, and see if this fits your needs. Please let us know how we can improve this, and we'll try our best to make things more cross-compatible. ## Other Improvements, Bugfixes & Closing Notes This update also fixes hundreds of bugs and brings other much needed cosmetic improvements. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. We wouldn't be able to do this without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting it by upgrading to a paid plan. It will help Cryptee immensely, and every payment helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. ### Fonts. GIFs. Document Locks. URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/fonts-gifs-document-locks/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:38:21.000Z After a long, busy and hot summer, it's time for another big update packed with new features you've been waiting for! Without further ado, let's get started! ## Fonts. Fonts. Fonts. Cryptee Docs finally gets support for multiple fonts. You can now use 12 different fonts for your documents. ![fonts](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/5/fonts.png) Needless to say they are loaded from Cryptee's servers, and not from a third party font host. And of course for all the multi-lingual, international users out there, if you use Cryptee to write documents with right-to-left languages, for example Hebrew, Arabic or Persian you can use **Alef** or **Markazi** for better Hebrew or Arabic & Persian support respectively. Or if for example you're using Vietnamese, **Markazi** supports Vietnamese as well. Please reach out if Cryptee doesn't support your language, or doesn't have fonts that support your language, and we can work together to add the most common, popular and open licensed fonts for your language right away. ## Cryptee Photos now supports GIFs! Cryptee Photos now supports GIFs up to 32mb! You can now upload all your favorite GIFs to Cryptee Photos. ![GIFS](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/5/photos-gifs.gif) ## You can now lock your documents! One of our dearest and most amazing users pointed out that Cryptee needs a way to lock documents and prevent further edits. You can now do that. So if you're the type of user who likes to copy and paste blog posts you won't be editing later, you can easily lock/unlock editing for documents. ![Docs Lock](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/5/docs-lock-edits.png) Oh and all dropdowns in Docs are now darker. ## Cryptee Photos now remembers your sort order for albums and photos This was one of the most requested features from those of you heavy Photos users. Now Cryptee Photos will remember the sort order for your albums and photos within. ![Photos Sort](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/5/photos-sort.png) ## Cryptee Photos gets a better bulk downloader You can now easily select and download your photos in bulk with our sleek new downloader. You can even continue to browse your gallery while your downloads are running, and keep adding more files to your download queue. Your browser does not support the video tag. In addition to making our *downloader* more efficient, we've also made our **uploader** more memory efficient. Your uploads to Cryptee Photos on Firefox are now 30% faster, and about 50% faster on all other browsers. ## New sign up flow! Chances are you're already a user if you're reading this, and this is something you don't have to worry about ever again. But this is where it all began; where you had to tick that annoying legal box. There is still that annoying legal box. Don't get too excited. But based on your feedback and stories, Cryptee now has a new sign up flow as of few weeks ago. ![Sign Up](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/5/signup.png) Already this new design is converting 25% more visitors to Cryptee users. ## Other Improvements, Bugfixes & Closing Notes The application is now 1mb smaller, PDF viewer in Docs is faster, and this update features more optimizations for the upcoming iOS 13 / iPad OS release. In addition, this update also fixed a 9 month old Photos bug, which was slowing things down on certain devices. Thanks to passionate beta users out there, this bug is now a thing of the past. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. We wouldn't be able to do this without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting it by upgrading to a paid plan. It will help Cryptee immensely, and every little bit of your payments help make the internet that much more safer and private. ### Improvements to Cryptee Photos URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/improvements-to-cryptee-photos/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:36:53.000Z Two weeks ago, we've introduced two fantastic new plans and prices. **400 GB** and **2000 GB**, for as low as **$€ 9 / mo** and **$€ 27 / mo**, so that you can encrypt your photo library and store them safely on Cryptee Photos. After we've announced our new plans and prices, signups have increased by 300%, and Cryptee's growing at a pace like never before. So we thought it's best to bring some new features and updates to Cryptee Photos to help you deal with your large photo libraries. ## Search just got a big update. Search is now more functional and beautiful than ever. It can tolerate typos, highlight your search terms, show the photos and albums you're looking for in a beautiful grid. ![photos-new-search](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/4/search.png) Over the summer we will keep improving Photos search and will add more search features like filtering. (for example filtering based on time like "All photos from 2019") ## Speed Improvements While we're re-tooling search, we've also improved its speed. **Photos search is now 3x faster**, and returns results instantly. This required carefully tuning tons of things like servers and how encrypted files are delivered to your devices, to making tweaks to how decryption operations are timed and handled in parallel to animations to make your experience smoother. ## Sorting is now easier & better. You can now sort your photos and albums better by name or date using the new sort dropdown on the top right. Cryptee can now automatically guess when the album is from based on its thumbnail, and display the month and year on the album. ![photos-new-sort](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/4/sort.png) If your albums have years in their names, for example like "Trip to Iceland - 2018", Cryptee will automatically use 2018 for sorting, otherwise fall back to thumbnail's dates. (For example JAN '17 in the screenshot above.) ## Bugfixes & Closing Notes This update also comes with many bugfixes. From photos uploader to Cryptee Docs' mobile experience. In addition, this update brings a few small new security features to ensure Cryptee's runtime safety. In the upcoming weeks we'll be adding more features to Cryptee Photos like right click actions, filtering, search filters, and more. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. We wouldn't be able to do this without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by switching to a paid plan. It will help us immensely, and every little bit helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. ### Cryptee 1st Year Update + New Plans & Prices URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptee-1st-year-update-new-plans-prices/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:33:03.000Z A year ago this week, Cryptee launched with a big mission. To provide you a well designed, safe and private place to keep your digital belongings. And it's been a fantastic first year. Be it getting featured on the Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch, to getting mentioned by The Guardian, Deutschlandfunk and many other incredibly reputable press outlets. This was all possible thanks to your help, feedback, bug reports, feature requests, financial and moral support. **Thank you so much**! To celebrate the first year, we've packed tons and tons of new stuff into this update. So much so that, one could call this a version 2.0! So much to talk about, so let's begin! ## New Plans & Prices Let's start with the biggest news. Things are now *a lot cheaper*, and you can store tons and *tons of data*. We're introducing 2 new storage plans to Cryptee. **400 GB** and **2000 GB**, for as low as **$€ 9 / mo** and **$€ 27 / mo** (tax included, and $ or € depending on your region) – You can upgrade to these fantastic, new, high-capacity storage plans from your home screen or account settings right away. And of course we didn't get rid of our free plan and most affordable 10GB plan. These changes were made possible by making massive updates on the datacenter-side, but also on the application side, to make sure the apps won't slow down once you upload terabytes of photos. ## New Features & Bugfixes ### Clear Formatting Button. You can now clear the formatting of the selected text with one click. ![clear-formatting](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/clear-formatting.png) With the addition of this button, we had to move all the tools closer together to make sure they fit on all screen sizes. – namely, iPads. (More on this below) ### A Quicker Way to Copy your Open Document Last month, we've added a one-click way to make copies of your documents, and pretty much everyone who discovered this feature asked to have this button in the active document dropdown as well as the folders view. So you can now make copies of your actively open documents as well, and the copy will be placed in the same folder. ![copy-active-doc](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/copy-active-doc.png) ### Home Document Actions In the past there wasn't a way to take actions on home documents, like export them, or view them larger. While adding the "Make a Copy" button, we thought it's time to add all these features for all the Home Documents as well. So now, you can export your home documents, see them larger in Viewing Mode, or Make a Copy of them from the active document dropdown, and the copy will be placed in the Inbox folder. (and this folder will be automatically created for you if it doesn't exist already) ![home-doc-actions](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/home-doc-actions.png) ### Dashboard Gets a Small Makeover The dashboard needed a makeover to acommodate the future/upcoming Cryptee apps and services, but also we just wanted to get rid of those old and ugly icons, which have been lingering since the first day of the launch. Oh and in case if you haven't noticed before, you can track the amount of storage you're using on your dashboard. We also got rid of the silly cross-fade effects on the dashboard, which were sadly causing issues displaying on Firefox. ![dashboard](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/dashboard.png) ### Smaller & More Performant Apps! After months of coding, thoughtful optimizations, and careful reductions, all of Cryptee's apps (web, mobile and desktop) are now more than 50% smaller in size. Which means downloading/loading speeds on new devices are 2x faster, apps are on average 10 - 15% more performant, and more importantly, this means a few more megabytes of extra space for your offline documents. ### Cryptee is ready for iOS 13 & iPad OS You've heard the news. Apple's going to release a new operating system for iPads called iPad OS, and they said it ships with a desktop-class browser. If you're as excited as we are, you might have rightfully wondered, so what does this mean for Cryptee? First. It means all the tools you're familiar with from Cryptee's Desktop / Web editor will be available on the iPad OS. Not just the trimmed down touch-screen stuff, but the whole kingdom. That's right, the full editor, with all the tools. ![docs-ipad-os](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/docs-ipad-os.jpeg) Secondly. With iPad OS you'll be able to split apps in one-thirds, two-thirds, and in half. So if you've ever dreamt of researching articles about Mars on the left, and writing an essay about it using Cryptee on the right, you can now do that. ![docs-ipad-half](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/docs-half.png) Do you need more space to read the article? You can simply make your browser bigger, and Cryptee will fit your screen, resize your content, and space your tools according to your screen split size. ![docs-ipad-one-third](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/docs-one-third.png) Or if you need more space for writing your article, that's okay too. ![docs-ipad-two-thirds](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/docs-two-thirds.png) iPad OS also brings support for USB flash drives & external hard-disks. So let's say you want to upload some photos to Cryptee from your hard-drive. Especially now that there are larger Cryptee storage plans available, you will likely want Cryptee Photos to resize and fit your workflow just like Cryptee Docs. Now you'll be able to do that. All you have to do is open Apple Photos on the left, Cryptee Photos on the right, and simply drag your photos into Cryptee. ![photos-ipad-half](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/photos-half.png) And just like Cryptee Docs, if you need more room for your Photos on the iPad, you can simply make Cryptee smaller, and your Cryptee Photos will resize and fit your screen perfectly. ![photos-ipad-one-third](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/photos-one-third.png) Or if you need more room for your photos on Cryptee Photos, you can make Cryptee Photos bigger, and your other application smaller. ![photos-ipad-two-thirds](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/3/photos-two-thirds.png) As you can see, everything will resize, shrink, and fit your workflow just the way you expect. Best part of all this is that, **all these new Cryptee features are available for iPad OS, starting today!** Yes. That's right. iPad OS itself isn't even out yet, and won't be until September. But, if you have the currently unreleased developer copy of the iPad OS (iOS 13) then you can start using these amazing new Cryptee features today. *Please keep in mind that iPad OS itself is still in beta, and Apple may break or change things until its release date in September, and could potentially affect or break the way these new Cryptee features work. If you have it, and you're using Cryptee on it, please reach out to us with all the bugs you see on Cryptee. We'll try and fix these bugs right away, ahead of the public iPad OS launch.* ## Bugfixes First things first. Many million thanks for all of you out there, taking the extra bit of time reporting bugs on Cryptee. All this is possible thanks to your kind and generous help and support! This update fixes several hundred bugs, animation glitches and performance issues. There's just too many of these to write here, but you'll definitely notice less issues. But especially if you're using KaTeX (or LaTeX math) we've fixed hundreds of bugs related to KaTeX, and you can now expect a much smoother formula-typing experience. Given how big of an update this is, there's a high chance this update introduces a few new bugs with it too. So if you find a bug, or have a feature idea, [reach out to us from our helpdesk](https://crypt.ee/help). We'll get things fixed right away. Speaking of bugs. Last month we got sponsored by an amazing company called **[Sentry](https://sentry.io)** – They make the best and most amazing bug & error trackers, and best of it all is that it's entirely open-source. So naturally we've been using Sentry since day one to hunt down, track and eliminate bugs on our platform and have been loving it. We're honored and humbled by their sponsorship & support, and can't thank them enough for helping us in our journey to make the internet a safer and more private place. Thank you fine folks @ Sentry. You are truly amazing. ## Closing Notes If you've read all the way down to this section, thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, and kind support. We wouldn't be able to do this without you. As a reminder, you can subscribe to this blog using Email or RSS! Email subscription box is at the bottom of the page. For the summer, we'll be slowing down the frequency of our major feature updates, and will focus on improving the user experience, all while building out two new services and apps for you. Needless to say, if you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by switching to a paid plan. It will help us immensely, and every little bit helps us make the internet that much more safer and private. ### Cryptee's cloud infrastructure is patched & protected from the speculative "ZombieLoad" attack URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/cryptees-cloud-infrastructure-is-patched-protected-from-the-speculative-zombieload-attack/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:27:19.000Z A newly discovered security flaw in Intel processors allows hackers to steal any data that’s been recently accessed by the processor. On cloud servers, it is speculated that this could allow an attacker to steal information from other virtual machines running on the same cluster. The attack utilizes CPU side channel issues known as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), described in [CVE-2018-12126](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2018-12126), [CVE-2018-12127](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2018-12127), [CVE-2018-12130](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2018-12130), and [CVE-2019-11091](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2019-11091). It is not known whether the speculative attack, dubbed ["ZombieLoad"](https://zombieloadattack.com/), has ever been used by malicious hackers. The flaw was discovered and disclosed to Intel by researchers from Graz University of Technology, and [Intel has issued patches for the vulnerability approximately 18 hours ago](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00233.html). **We're happy to announce that already the patches have been deployed on all of Cryptee's Cloud Infrastructure, and the speculative execution vulnerabilities have been mitigated.** We strongly recommend our users to follow updates from Apple, Google and Microsoft to patch their own personal computers using the following links : ### May Features Update URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/may-features-update/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:25:01.000Z This month's update brings a few widely requested new features, performance improvements for Photos, lots of bug fixes, and some under-the-hood preparations for the upcoming month's big update. ## Copy / Duplicate Docs ![Copy Documents](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/2/copy.png) You can now easily copy / duplicate your documents & file. A lot of the users have requested a way to easily copy / duplicate documents to create templates. For example, you can now create a standard template for your weekly meeting notes, and quickly make a copy of it for the new week's meeting. ## KaTeX Improvements & Warnings ![KaTeX Errors](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/2/katex-error.png) Many KaTeX / LaTeX users have requested a way to see if their formula has errors, typos or mistakes. Needless to say Cryptee cannot predict what your formulas are, however it can now warn you if you're missing brackets, parentheses, or made syntax errors. ## A New, more performant Cryptee Photos Your browser does not support the video tag. This update extends last month's iOS performance improvements, and brings an all new 60fps gesture-controlled photo viewer. Cryptee Photos can now preload, decrypt and show your photos in mere milliseconds, allowing you to swipe through your photos in 59-60fps. In addition, if you have a massive gallery or even an album full of tens of thousands of photos, you can now scroll through your album in 60fps, and Cryptee Photos will preload, decrypt and show your thumbnails as quickly as you are able to scroll. That being said, if you have more than 100,000 photos in the same album, you may want to categorize your photos better to find them easier. ## Closing notes That's all for this update! Other than hundreds of bug fixes of course. Hopefully these new features will make you feel more at home while using Cryptee, increase your productivity, and bring happiness to your life overall! Needless to say, if you like these new features & updates, please consider subscribing to the paid plan. It's cheaper than a cup of coffee, and together we can make the internet a safer and more private place. All the very best from Northern Europe, John ### April Performance Update URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/april-performance-update/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T11:22:47.000Z This was a busy month for Cryptee's development. This update comes packed with fantastic new features, improvements, changes and performance boosts. So much so that, there was no way to fit all these changes into the tiny news box on the homepage anymore. A lot to cover, so let's not lose time, and start right away! ## Cryptee for iOS just got a lot better & faster! Ever since launching Cryptee back in June 2018, a lot of iOS users have been asking for improvements to Cryptee's iOS app. Things like faster switching-time between apps, better ways to multi-task, drag & drop from other apps and more. But most importantly, so many users have been asking for a "native app", assuming that none of these features would be possible to achieve with a PWA. *well... now these are all possible* and still with a PWA! First of all. The iOS app now runs at 60fps on capable devices, launches instantly, and continues where you left off when you're switching between other apps. Here's a quick video! Your browser does not support the video tag. ## Multi-tasking on iOS! If you're a fan of multi-tasking on your iPad, this update is for you! You can now view your PDFs on Cryptee side-by-side with your document, and continue editing your document all at the same time. This used to be a desktop only feature, but now it's available on iOS as well. You can see this in action in the first video, but here's a screenshot: ![Side-By-Side](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/1/side-by-side.jpeg) Also, the iOS app can now work in multi-tasking mode. So you can drag and drop images or text into Cryptee from other apps without ever leaving Cryptee. Here's a video showing how this works: Your browser does not support the video tag. **Please note that these features require iOS 12.2\. So if you haven't updated your iOS to the latest version, now is a good time.** ## Cryptee Docs Performance Unlike most other secure / privacy services, everything, including file-names & folder-names are encrypted on Cryptee. This means that Cryptee's staff can't even see what your files / documents or folders are called. But this has a performance side-effect. Every time you load Cryptee Docs, first all your file-names & folder-names have to be downloaded and decrypted before Docs can start in the first place. This used to be a rather time-consuming process, delaying the amount of time it takes for you to launch Cryptee Docs and start writing your documents. This update brings some improvements to the start-up process. Cryptee now builds and stores a small encrypted index & cache on your device the first time you launch Docs. So next time you launch Docs, this encrypted index & cache is used instead, and only the changes are downloaded & decrypted, allowing Cryptee Docs to start up under 2 seconds even on slower devices. ## Presentation / Viewing Mode One of Cryptee's amazing beta-testers mentioned that he occasionally needs to make a presentation from his Cryptee Documents, and having a viewing-only-mode which strips all the buttons would be immensely useful for this purpose. Now you can quickly toggle the Viewing Mode, and present your documents on big screen. ![Editing Mode](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/1/editing-mode.jpeg) ![Viewing Mode](https://static.crypt.ee/blog-content/1/viewing-mode.jpeg) ## The Blog. Many of you have been asking for a convenient blog / newsletter to follow all the changes & software updates to Cryptee. This turned out to be more difficult than it seemed on the surface. The ideal blog for a privacy service like Cryptee would have to hosted on a platform that respects readers' privacy. So no Medium, no Blogger etc. – and ideally a platform with a convenient subscription system which supports [rss](https://blog.crypt.ee/feed/), or email subscriptions (you can subscribe below) So everything on this page, including the videos, gifs, and even fonts are hosted by Cryptee, leaving no room for others to track you so that you can privately read & subscribe to Cryptee's product updates. So no youtube trackers or nasty cookie banners. And, that's all for this update! *\[other than hundreds of bug fixes of course\]* Hopefully these new features will make you feel more at home while using Cryptee, increase your productivity, and bring happiness to your life overall! Needless to say, if you like these new features & updates, please consider subscribing to the paid plan. It's cheaper than a cup of coffee, and together we can make the internet a safer and more private place. All the very best from Northern Europe, John ### Finally, Cryptee has a blog URL: https://blog.crypt.ee/finally-cryptee-has-a-blog/ Last updated: 2021-03-23T10:26:20.000Z You can now read news and updates about Cryptee here on our blog! Best part is that you can subscribe to this blog using rss or email using the subscribe box below as well.