why i went local-first

i'm going to be honest with you. when i first built jottie, it was a cloud app. notes went to a server, got processed by gemini, came back with tags and embeddings. standard stuff.

it worked fine. but something about it never sat right with me.

notes are different

notes aren't like other data. they're raw thoughts. half-formed ideas. rants about your boss. medical stuff. relationship stuff. the kind of things you write down because you need to get them out of your head.

and i was asking people to send all of that to my server.

sure, i had encryption. aes-256-gcm. kms for key management. all the enterprise-grade stuff. but here's the thing - encryption at rest doesn't mean much when you're decrypting everything to process it.

the note still leaves your device. it still goes over the wire. it still gets processed on a machine you don't control.

with local-first, none of that happens. your note gets processed right on your phone, the results stay on your phone, and nothing ever leaves unless you want it to.

the current state of the world

i won't get too political here, but let's just say i've become a lot more privacy-conscious in the past year. cloud services change. companies get acquired. policies shift. servers get subpoenaed.

your notes are too important to depend on someone else's infrastructure being available. or trustworthy.

so i made a decision: what if the notes never had to leave your device at all?

apple gave us the tools

turns out apple has been quietly shipping incredible on-device ml capabilities. nlembedding for semantic search. natural language framework for entity extraction. and now apple foundation models for more complex stuff.

all of it runs on your phone. no internet required. no server. no subscription.

the quality isn't quite as good as what gemini offers. i'm not going to lie about that. but it's pretty close. and for most people, it's more than good enough.

more importantly, your notes never leave the apple ecosystem unless you explicitly opt into cloud sync.

what this means for you

- you can use jottie without creating an account
- notes work even if my servers go down
- you can export everything, anytime
- no subscription required for local features
- your data stays on your device, protected by your passcode

the cloud sync feature still exists if you want backup and cross-device access. but it's optional. the local copy is always the source of truth.

it's a forcing function

going local-first has been a really interesting constraint. it forces you to think differently about what features actually matter. you can't just throw compute at problems. you have to be clever.

and honestly? some of the best features in jottie 2.0 came from working within these constraints. location auto-tagging using on-device gps. contact extraction using the contacts framework. calendar integration. siri shortcuts.

the ios app feels native because it actually is native. no web wrappers hitting apis. just the same frameworks that apple's own apps use.

your notes should be yours

that's really what it comes down to. i built jottie because i needed it. i take a lot of notes and i hate organizing them. but i also want to trust that my notes are actually private.

local-first isn't just a technical architecture. it's a promise. your notes stay on your device. they're yours and yours only.

that's the way it should be.