Fortune 5 company here–we have tens of thousands of technical users on Macs. Like many others, iCloud and Dropbox are blocked. Not a day goes by when I don’t see at least one person complaining on our internal Mac slack channel about a lack of available good note taking apps due to the syncing restrictions.
I think its a bit of an exaggeration to claim that there are too many services to support and that people will always ask for more, so you are hesitant to open the flood gates. IMO iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon, and WebDAV would likely satisfy everyone’s needs. Just WebDAV alone would go a long way, since its something of a catchall solution.
As one person above noted, this thread has been ongoing for almost four years. You have repeatedly mentioned it would take a maximum of one month of development to add an additional sync option. Idk, it seems like in four years you could have done the one quarter (or one month, in the case of WebDAV) of development and be done with it? You mention that this only affects a small subset of users and there are more pressing roadmap items, but I do wonder about all the potential (corporate) users who cannot use Agenda due to a lack of sync/backup option. I’d imagine this is quite a lot of people.
I’m confused. iCloud and Dropbox are blocked at your company you say but you are advocating for iCloud and DropBox, saying they would satify everyone’s needs??
Update: Your note prompted me to go back and look at the original post. 1) They added Dropbox to the already existing iCloud, and 2) Apple offers end to end- encryption for iCloud according to this iCloud Security Overview.
I’m not sure why you’re confused. Yes, iCloud and Dropbox are blocked by my company. I am advocating for a solution that supports all of the following: iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google, Amazon, WebDAV. I believe that would satisfy everyone. The first two are done. Sounds like one quarter of development would deliver the others. For me (and others) this is by far the most important request since without a working sync/backup solution, agenda cannot be used. Doesn’t matter what other features are added in that case.
As I have pointed out a few times in the thread, everyone wants something else. That’s the problem. You think your list covers everyone, but I know people at Apple, and they want Box to be supported. So it goes on and on…
We are investigating some options which may open up more backends, as well as what would be involved to do our own. But it’s not a short term project, and putting everything on hold for a 3-6 months also doesn’t seem very palatable.
Appreciate the feedback in any case.
So more is better. your company would allow which ones?
Amazon and WebDAV
I could imagine WebDAV might be a nice thing to support for people with strict security policies. That backend is certainly on our radar.
I was just looking at Ulysses and their External Folders sync option looks perfect. They market it towards Dropbox and Git, but it looks like it would work for almost any third-party sync service.
Thanks. Ulysses is a completely different app, with different data structure. They just use markdown files, I believe. It’s a markdown editor. It’s also proprietary, so the code is not available.
We could add something like that, but it wouldn’t satisfy many people, because it would be Mac only. Most people want sync to iOS devices as well.
Thanks for the feedback!
Hello everyone,
Congratulations on your work and your app, it’s really great. I used it for a long time (as a subscriber), but nowadays, my concerns about privacy have become increasingly important. Specifically, after a recent incident with my iCloud account, which was “locked” by Apple for a period of time to secure it. This made me realize the need to keep my data at home, for example through a NAS. I now only use applications that are compatible with WebDAV/CardDAV/CalDAV, which are standards, and indeed I couldn’t find a solution for this with your app, so I no longer use it. Therefore, I’m giving a thumbs up for this type of feature!
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll take it along. It would indeed be good to add WebDAV.
Interesting. I didn’t know anyone used WebDAV or its relatives anymore.
I know you’re skittish about iCloud because of your recent experience, but I did want to note from a privacy & security standpoint, if you enable end to end encryption on iCloud and then turn on the encrypted iCloud option in Agenda, your data is protected by encryption keys which are only present on your devices, and cannot be accessed by anyone else, including Apple.
If you’re managing your data at home, don’t forget to make backups and store them offsite.
I believe that the person was pointing to the availability of data if one gets locked out of iCloud account (Not about E2EE, which of course if a better feature for privacy)
I would like to self-host my data and use Agenda with that data. So, +1 for WebDAV support from my side. If it can be made E2EE, even better!
Hello -
I have not been active in the forum for a while, and am not quite up to date on this topic: Has WebDAV support been added to the roadmap in the meantime? Seven and a half years later - where has the time gone…
It’s in the list, but it always has been. We just have to prioritize projects based on the whole user base (…and keep up with whatever Apple is adding — this is a big year).
We would like to add it, but the number of our customers using it is not very large, unfortunately.
Personally, I thank you for prioritizing projects based on the whole user base, which includes keeping up with Apple’s innovation.
The reality of WebDav is that it’s actually not very widely used, as there are other, better solutions (such as professionally operated cloud services like iCloud) that are actually better for users to use. Additionally, WebDav implementations are very fragmented, with variations from implementation to another resulting in a need to tailor clients to the particular servers being used.
Now that App Intents are accessible to users as actions in the Shortcuts app and Spotlight, a better approach to this request might be to ensure that Agenda’s App Intents provide sufficient mechanisms for a user or shortcut or another application to utilize them to discover all Notes updated since , iterate through the list to obtain the contents and metadata of said notes, so that they can then utilize App Intents provided by some other application to write the notes to a store, as well as the converse, to read said store, and via App intents, propagate changes to Agenda on a different device.
Or, stick to iCloud sync which is private, secure and reliable.
I would very much like to use Agenda again because I love this app. But with the momentary situation, what is going on in the US you should really offer more possibilities to sync. And webDAV should be one of the first to implement in my opinion because it makes it possible to choose your own to sync.
As I mentioned, I love this app very much, but didn’t use it anymore because I don’t want to use iCloud anymore or dropbox or anything like that.
I could imagine that user would choose other ways to sync if there is a choice.
Thank you very much
We’ll take it along. Unfortunately WebDAV is pretty notorious for not being very standard. Microsoft does I different to unix systems etc. It’s a bit of a hornets nest, and very few people have the technical skills to set it up.
If we add other commercial offerings like Google or MS, you get similar issues with trust as with Apple and Dropbox.
We’ll try to support WebDAV in future.
A post was split to a new topic: Issues with Apple Account
While I’ve decided I can’t move away from the Apple ecosystem, with an eye to data sovereignty I’m looking to move data and services to UK/EU/EEA based providers where I can.
It would be great to see an alternative, non-US, privacy focused, sync and storage provider for Agenda.