Hey, one of the folks working on Ente here, thanks for supporting us!
Are there any interactions that you find annoying within the app? It'd be great if you could specifics, we'd like to explore what is feasible within the bounds of Flutter.
Hey, first of all if was bad or annoying I would not have began to use it. It's not bad, it's actually good generally speaking and from the functionality point of view. You have done a great job considering you had to deal with one of the most private data on two platforms who are very sceptical about giving data access and in their own different ways. Not to mentioned the kinds of feature you all offer while keeping things e2ee is simply great.
It is more about aesthetics and personal preference point of view. Being mobile developer doesn't help either. The thing is you end up noticing everything that a non-native app misses and skips. Small clunks .. the way something loads and how the transition happens et cetera, some textures, corners, icons, the general UI design philosophies like some shades are simply not going to be the same in a non-native app (unless one is doing pixel to pixel matching which would defeat the purpose of picking a multi platform way to begin with).
Discussing so called "drawbacks" would be doing a disservice to your excellent product and also to your goal. I am sure you had a reason to pick up a common codebase (maybe speed; small team or something else - doesn't matter) and it's really a fine product. It's just about my personal preference.
Thank you for these fine FOSS apps and good luck!
(I still be using Ente Auth fwiw - because there are no better alternatives, let alone a better native alternative :-) 2FAS could have come close but it's not there at all)
We chose a cross-platform framework to keep the team small, longevity is important for a company like Ente.
Also, we understand moving to native is inevitable. We should have sufficient engineering bandwidth to invest in a rewrite towards the end of 2026. Hopefully you will give us another shot then :)
Embeddings (and other derived metadata) will sync across all your devices e2ee. So you could use our desktop app[1] to import and index your existing library. Newer photos will get indexed during upload on respective clients.
Search is yet to be implemented on web and indexing is turned off by default on devices with < 4gb of RAM. You can opt-in from Settings > General > Advanced > Machine learning.
I can’t see any evidence of encryption on their front page. I can see evidence of storing your data in multiple third party clouds (this is advertised as a feature, data redundancy).
Wow, 1TB of photos? This is just astonishing to me. What is the use of so many images? As an ex semi-pro photographer, one of the things I realized is that what makes photographs special to people, even family photographs, is the rarity of them.
So I just cannot understand taking and holding on to this many images. I would find just managing the images would take away time and money from my family.
A combination of taking photos for just any purpose (from memos to remember posters, events, or even store prices, to notes) for 2 decades now, enough interest in photography to have played with raw for while and still keep a bunch of them for my favorites, to our kid happening, and a lot of traveling around, which meant additional deluges of pictures.
Google Photos makes it a no-brainer to manage, which largely contributed to the size inflation (which is also why searching and indexing have become critical to us)
PS: I declared bankruptcy on photo management a long time ago. Reducing my library to a decent size is totally possible but would take months of sifting through near duplicates.
For me the problem is that I'm not a great photographer. I take loads of bad photos. It would take me far too much time to go through all of them and decide which ones to keep.
Also, my wife and I sometimes look at old photos for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the photo or even with reminiscing. Instead, we may look for some specific fact (mole, dental issue, dress, haircut, domestic repairs, flooded footpaths, etc). The more photos we keep, the more likely it is that we can find what we're looking for.
In this day and age, dealing with that amount of data even to archival standards may well be cheaper than you’d rate your labor to sort all the wheat from the chaff…
Thanks. I would gladly take away the "convenience of AI search" for the privacy that your service provides.
I used Ente once, and it was great, but I am poor, so I just store my images locally now. Not that your service is expensive or not worth it because I think it is.
I work on a similar product, and honestly the AI parts dont really matter wrt privacy. Its uninteresting. The EXIF information is way more private and useful, but exif data is also what makes the product usable. If you strip exif, you might as well chuck all your photos in a single folder and call it a day. We also dont sell your data to anyone and we dont run analysis on your data
Brave search is a continuation of cliqz. A German company that developed a proper search engine, with an independent index. They shut down, but the tech got sold off.
Cliqz was the first time for me that a Google alternative actually worked really well - and it, or now brave search, is what parent was asking for :)
Yet we're still back to Larry Page and Sergey Brin's conclusion in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" research paper[0]:
> We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Brave Search Premium hasn't been around nearly as long as their free tier serving ads, and I'm not confident this conflict of interest is gone.
Having independent indexes is a win regardless though.
Are there any interactions that you find annoying within the app? It'd be great if you could specifics, we'd like to explore what is feasible within the bounds of Flutter.
Thanks again!