Here’s an announcement that the team at encrypted email app ‘Tutanota’ has sent us….
The app is now available on F-Droid “making it the go-to secure email service that enables everybody to stop using Google.” To date, claim these chaps, no email service has published its Android app on F-Droid, which is a well know platform for free & open source apps.
Most email services rely on Google’s GCM for push notifications, which make an F-Droid release impossible. With its app release on F-Droid, Tutanota claims it can now prove that it is possible to build a secure email service that is completely “Google-free”, giving people a real open source alternative to the data-hungry market leader Gmail.
The F-Droid team comments on Tutanota’s app release: We are happy to see how enthusiastic Tutanota is about F-Droid & free software, having rewritten their app from scratch so it could be included. Furthermore, they take special measures to avoid tracking you, & the security looks solid with support for end-to-end encryption & 2-factor authentication.”
Focus on privacy & security
For the uninitiated, Tutanota is a secure email service that focuses on security & privacy. Being open source is a crucial part of this. From its early days, Tutanota has been published as open source, licensed under GPLv3.
“Only with open source software, 3rd parties can verify that we remain true to our goal: Protecting the privacy of our users by offering a fully encrypted mailbox without any backdoors”, says Matthias Pfau, Co-founder & developer of Tutanota.
“We build Tutanota to establish a secure alternative to mainstream email services like Gmail & Yahoo that spy on their users. Leaving Google behind is not easy, but the effort is worth it; you will regain control over your data. When you use services like Tutanota’s fully encrypted mailbox, you own your data – no one else can access it”, adds Pfau. “Of course, when it comes to leaving Google behind, F-Droid is one of the most important platforms you’ll need as this is the best place to get Google-free Android apps with automatic updates.”
Tutanota’s Android & iOS apps have been published as open source from their 1st release back in 2014. The original Tutanota Android app has been built based on Cordova, which along with using GCM for push made it impossible to publish the app on F-Droid in the past because the F-Droid servers could not build the app.
“Not being able to publish our Android app on F-Droid was one of the main reasons we started to re-build the entire Tutanota Web client”, explains Pfau. “We are privacy & open source enthusiasts, we ourselves use F-Droid. Consequently our app must be published there, no matter the effort.”
In the past year, Tutanota has completely re-build their mail client & published it with lots of enhancements in public beta. The new client is much faster, comes with a better design, enables search on encrypted data, supports 2FA and auto-sync, & it is not based on Cordova anymore.
“We are very excited about this release, not only because of the new features, but most of all because the new Android app will finally come without any ties to Google services”, says Pfau. “As a secure email service, this is very important to us.
Image Credit: Tutanota
