EteSync is currently the top recommendation under Digital Notebooks and the second recommendation for Calendar and Contact sync. Both of these recommendations should be either reworded (to give caveats) or removed to reflect the state of the project.
The DAV-Bridge for desktop use is buggy and unreliable. I’m speaking both from personal experience and reflecting the 95 unresolved issues on GitHub. Its last update was 11 months ago.
The iOS app is very poor and has not been updated in over two years. It requires users to open the app, wait a few seconds for it to slowly load, then hit a manual sync button just to send any changes - and even those are unreliable. The lack of automatic syncing is due to iOS limitations, but basic improvements that would greatly help the syncing flow were marked as “help wanted” and have seen no active development. The iOS app is abandoned.
The only platform where Contacts and Calendar sync work basically as expected is on Android, where the app still sees occasional updates (most recent in September 2022).
EteSync is no longer under development on most platforms
The apps have severe usability / reliability issues on most platforms
The total lack of development could lead to worsening usability or security issues
It’s not the only or best option in either the notebook or contact/calendar sync categories
I propose that:
EteSync Notes should be removed as a recommendation
EteSync Calendar / Contacts should only be recommended for Android, with a disclaimer stating that iOS / desktop apps exist but are no longer developed and have issues.
It doesn’t make sense to recommend a (paid) option here when other, better options exist with equivalent or better functionality and privacy.
Note: I originally wrote this post with many more links to GitHub reflecting the issues I mentioned, but the forum says I can only include two links so I had to remove them.
Thank you for the detailed post. I’ve been seeing people talking about issues they’ve been having with EteSync on Matrix as well. The dev seems to be fairly unresponsive. It’s currently using SDK 29 which actually prevents it from being updated on the Play Store, although on F-Droid there is a new version. With the rest of the team’s input, I think we should move forward with removing all EteSync software from our recommendations. @dngray@Jonah@freddy@Niek-de-Wilde
It’s quite sad. As there is no fully e2ee contact sync left. Proton doesn’t encrypt your contacts. Also it cannot sync the contacts to your phone which runs it quite useless for most people I know. Not sure about tutanota.
Nextcloud in my experience sucks even more when it comes to syncing contacts and calendar. It’s not a great state.
Well this is fully right. I have many contacts with just a phone number. There is no need for it to be none e2ee and I take issue with the data being visible to Proton. It can largely identify your social graph and perhaps sensitive contacts. This may be different in one other’ thread model.
But generally the lacking ability to view the contacts via an app on the phone makes it to be nothing usable to me.
Which can also be gathered from monitoring any email provider’s SMTP relay. I think the reason Proton doesn’t bother encrypting this is because there isn’t a lot of point, email providers must be able to determine where an email comes from, and where it should be sent to.
Protonmail’s app also won’t show show those in the dialer either. It’s been a requested feature to add an adapter https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-mail-android/issues/10 for that. Maybe they could have an option to expose some contacts to the phone.
Once again it’s looking like hosting your own small Radicale service and using DAVx⁵ to connect to it is probably the least painful experience. Maybe we could even do a little blog tutorial on that. Radicale is super easy to set up, because essentially it’s a single python script with minimal dependencies.
You could probably do this on your home LAN/PC if you don’t want to pay for hosting. Of course it would only be synchronized when connected to your server.
That would be fantastic. I haven’t self-hosted anything before so a step-by-step guide for non-programmers would be appreciated. If my calendar and contacts were hosted on my own hardware then I wouldn’t be as concerned with them being E2EE.
Arent they currently focusing on their Etebase backend?
I used to subscribe to them but then the recession hit and cost cutting came and had to let them go.
The project seems to offer a simple and basic functionality. Does anyone else think they are approaching a feature complete state and that they are focusing on other things (like the aforementioned EteBase)?
I don’t think that would be a good idea. If you don’t know how it works you won’t be able to secure it well (sorry).
Damn, you’re right. In that case I’ll either have to wait for Proton Calendar to mature a bit or make peace with a CalDAV provider that is privacy-respecting but not E2EE (Mailbox.org?). As much as I want me calendar data locked away, it doesn’t do me much good if it doesn’t work.
The project seems to offer a simple and basic functionality. Does anyone else think they are approaching a feature complete state and that they are focusing on other things (like the aforementioned EteBase)?
I wouldn’t consider it feature complete when improvements promised years ago haven’t been implemented (Notes) and the dev is saying he doesn’t have time to fix major bugs and usability issues.
“Feature complete,” to me, implies that bug fixes and reliability improvements are still happening, just no big new features (like FairEmail). EteSync only works as advertised and expected on Android, while every other platform has serious issues and no development.
Just before I wrote this post I had the desktop bridge eat another one of my events. Issues like this are happening all the time, and there is generally no dev response and no updates.
It’s just not fully functional, unfortunately. I really really really really really want EteSync (or something like EteSync) to succeed, but PrivacyGuides probably shouldn’t recommend tools / services that aren’t reliable. Hence my suggestion for only recommending on Android or adding a disclaimer.
Fortunately it’s not a particularly complicated setup.
What we could look at doing is adding to a guide, the ability to start the service on boot, and a systemd unit which starts Radicale on boot (if you’re on Linux). Instructions for automatically starting on a Mac would be rather trivial too.
Once set up users would just need to “have their PC on” and connect to the same LAN to “synchronize”, obviously if you want it available everywhere, you’d need a server or something connectable from the Internet.
I dunno about you guys, but i rarely add new contacts to my phone, and if i do I’m happy for them to be synchronized next time i sit down at my computer. It’s not like adding those things without access to Radicale will mean that they aren’t added, just simply that your other devices won’t see the new contacts, calendar items until they are connected.
I don’t think it’s dead-dead, judging by the dev occasionally popping in and the one recent Android update. But on non-Android platforms it’s at the very least inactive - it doesn’t work reliably and there is no development happening.
Although it may be simple, I wouldn’t want to advice people to manage their own opsec if they are inexperienced. Depends on the value of the data. In my case I have sensitive data on contacts which would be very problematic if exposed. It may be different for someone else.
If you like to learn to do some Unix get a raspberry pi and play with it to get yourself comfortable. I could recommend the videos of Network Chuck and David Bombal if you want to learn some awesome stuff @mika