Amazing Apps for Productive, Reliable and Secure Workflows and Communication

We want to use amazing apps that have incredible UIs and work seemlessly in our daily lives. But right now we lose all our privacy and security with this approach.
We even train Large Language Models (LLMs) with our own data today, even if we aren't consenting.

This is why it's crucial to support projects that give live to secure communication, secure calls, video chats, private notes, business communications and so on.

We just don't want to be spied on from strangers. We don't want our voices to be copied. We don't want our own images to be used to generate someones boyfriend. We don't want our product secrets and prototypes stolen. We want to own our own data.

I believe we can do this if we can read the code, and I mean thereby the full open source code. So that we can verify our data is being properly encrypted on the device.
Still, some of the providers listed have not posted the full open-source code of their codebases yet, but because of their transparency and business model and lack of alternative software, they are capable of giving us confidence to a degree no other provider can. And I think this too has to be respected.

If we want to go completely secure, we can self host our data on our own home servers with for example DynDNS. And I think that's a good approach if we have a lot of data, but depending on our solution the data transfers might not be E2EE (end to end encrypted) on device. And the user interface might not be that great. The trust might lie in a company providing the NAS server with closed source-code software. Add to this, the additional workload of managing and setting up the server and storage or configuration of mail servers. And then the lack of great mail apps for your custom setup that don't sell your data, prevent loading identifiers etc.

Photos App

  • Ente, even with OpenStreetMap of photo locations. (open-source)

Passwords / 2FA Codes

  • Ente Auth for 2FA. (open-source)
  • Proton Pass free password manager. (some clients open-source: web, android, ios)
  • KeePassXC keeps encrypted passwords in a .kdbx file. (open-source)

You can for example keep your passwords in Proton Pass and secure it with 2FA from Ente Auth. The two passwords for Proton Pass and Ente Auth can be written on paper, or stored in KeePassXC, as well as all non server synced passwords.

Wiki / Articles / Scientific Journaling

  • BookStack, great user interface. (open-source)
  • MediaWiki the project that powers Wikipedia. (open-source)

Mail

Transparency is key here. Backdoors can be implemented when any criminal activity takes place. Both providers listed are working on quantum encryption.

  • Tutanota rolled its own encryption, so the whole mail is encrypted. Easy for non Tutanota users to access emails if password is exchanged. (open-source clients)
  • Proton Mail supports OpenPGP. Might be difficult to get other users of other mail platforms to add OpenPGP encryption. (some clients open-source: web, android, ios).

Notes

Team / Company Chat

  • Matrix an open network for secure decentralised communication. See available clients and servers under "Ecosystem".
  • Mattermost, a Slack like app and (open-source)
  • Rocket Chat (open-source)

Messages

  • Signal encrypted messaging. Accounts are findable by phone number, but you can disable it and set a username. (open-source)
  • Briar decentralized encrypted messaging using Tor. (open-source)

Browsers

There is a great discussion about Mullvad Browser, Tor and LibreWolf here.

  • Mullvad Browser can be used with Mullvad VPN. Sets fixed webpage width, might not use full screen width. (open-source)
  • Tor for hiding IP and traffic. (open-source)
  • Brave Browser for usual private browsing. Also have their own VPN. About the controversies there is a big thread about it here. (core is open-source)
  • uBlock if you use Firefox or Chrome. (open-source)
  • (LibreWolf) probably very private browser, but signing issues on MacOs. (open-source)

Calendar

Drive / Documents

  • Proton Drive (some clients open-source: web, android, ios)
  • (Filen) there were some controversies. (open-source clients)
  • For self-hosting a Synology NAS is probably the easiest and software-wise best solution right now. But TrueNAS is also popular and ownCloud is open-source.

Code Editors

  • Zed (open-source)

Android App Store

Android Operating System

But I have no idea if Android or its phone hardware can be secure at all. The Android project is very large and we have seen sophisticated attacks with full access before. The best way if you need Android is to run only open-source apps and use GrapheneOS. Forget iOS as its closed-source. And remember there is no gurantee against Operating System flaws.


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