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Plainva is coming to your phone

July 14, 2026

For most of Plainva’s life so far it has been a desktop app. That was always only half the plan. The other half — the half that makes the whole thing worth it — is having the same vault in your pocket. That part is nearly here, and I want to tell you what it is before it lands.

The same notes, everywhere, over your own cloud

Here’s the idea in one sentence: your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder in your cloud — Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, WebDAV/Nextcloud or S3 — and Plainva keeps that folder in sync between your desktop and your phone. No account with me, no server of mine in the middle, no extra subscription. You already pay for the storage; Plainva just reads and writes to it.

Let me be honest about where Plainva sits, because I’d rather you hear it from me than catch me overselling. It isn’t the only app that can sync over your own storage — Joplin does that too. What’s specific to Plainva is the combination: it opens your existing Obsidian-compatible vault directly, .base databases and all, and the desktop↔phone sync costs nothing. With Obsidian itself, keeping your notes on every device means either Obsidian Sync — a paid subscription, currently 4–8 $ a month — or pointing a third-party cloud at your vault yourself, which is unsupported and unencrypted. Plainva’s answer is simpler: use the cloud you already have, on both desktop and phone, for free.

What “nearly here” means

Plainly: it’s a beta first. I’m bringing it to Android and iOS through the stores’ test channels, then opening it wider through August. I’d rather a smaller group finds the rough edges on real phones and real vaults before everyone else — the same way the desktop app got better the moment people who weren’t me started using it.

If you’d like to be there for that, the best thing you can do is join the waitlist on plainva.com — I’ll write to you the moment the mobile beta opens, with the link to get on it. And, as always with an early build: keep a backup of your vault. Just good sense.

The desktop app is free and open source and out today for Windows, macOS and Linux. The phone is the part that makes it feel like one thing instead of two.

— Marco