The short version
- No account. Jotry never asks for your email, a password or your name.
- No tracking. The app doesn’t collect what you write. If diagnostics are ever added, they’ll be opt-in and will leave out note contents.
- On your phone. Notes live in the app’s private storage, protected by your phone’s encryption.
- Encrypted when synced. With Backup & sync on, notes are encrypted on your device before they’re sent, and the server keeps only what it can’t read.
Where your notes live
Your notes, notebooks and version history are stored on your phone, in storage only Jotry can open, and protected by your phone’s own device encryption. Without Backup & sync, the app never sends your notes over the network. The only exception is something you ask for: when you share a web page to Jotry, Jotry fetches that page to make the note.
Phone backups
| What happens | |
|---|---|
| Android | Jotry is included in your Google backup only when that backup is end-to-end encrypted. Android does that on Android 9 and later when your phone has a screen lock (PIN, pattern or password), and Google can’t read those backups. Without a screen lock, Jotry is left out of cloud backup. |
| iPhone | Jotry keeps your notes out of iCloud and computer backups, because iCloud Backup is end-to-end encrypted only when Advanced Data Protection is on. To move to a new iPhone, turn on Backup & sync, or export your notes and import them there. |
Backup & sync
Backup & sync is optional. When you turn it on:
- Every note is encrypted on your device with a key of its own, before it’s sent. The server stores encrypted records: it can’t read your notes, titles, notebook names, the names of your devices or the nicknames of people you share with.
- The keys stay on your devices, and your 24-word recovery key can bring them back. Jotry can’t, because it never has them.
- The server does see what any server sees: that encrypted records exist, roughly how big they are, and when your devices sync.
- Removing a device changes the keys, so a lost phone can’t read anything written after it was removed.
Read more on the Backup & sync and sharing pages.
Titles written on your phone
On phones with an on-device language model, Jotry can write a note’s title for you. The model runs entirely on your phone, and your note never leaves it.
Leaving is easy
You can export every note as ordinary Markdown files whenever you like. Exports contain your current notes; version history stays in the app.