What Plainva can't do yet
I once picked a note-taking app off its features page, moved a few hundred notes over, and only then found out the sync it promised was “coming soon.” I don’t want to do that to you. Plainva is a v0.1 — I use it daily, it’s reasonably well tested, but it’s early. Here’s the honest list of what it doesn’t do yet.
What’s not here yet
The one I hear about most is mobile — and that’s the part that’s finally moving. Plainva runs on Windows, macOS and Linux today, and the phone version is now in closed testing on Android and iOS; I wrote about how it’s getting there recently. It isn’t in the app stores yet, so there’s still nothing you can just tap and install — but it’s real now, not a someday. Because sync goes through your own storage rather than mine, the same vault will simply start working there; until the public beta opens, there’s a page to get notified. The macOS build has its own asterisk: it works, but isn’t code-signed yet, so Gatekeeper grumbles the first time — right-click the app, choose Open, done. (I don’t even own a Mac myself, so if something looks off there, I genuinely want to hear it.) And while WebDAV, Nextcloud, S3-compatible storage, OneDrive and Dropbox all connect in a couple of clicks, Google Drive still asks for a one-time, free Google Cloud project of your own — about five minutes, until Plainva clears Google’s CASA security review.
What’s missing by design, for now
There’s no plugin system and no real-time collaboration — sync between your own devices works fine, but two people editing the same note live isn’t a thing yet. And while sync is encrypted in transit and your credentials sit in the OS keychain, Plainva doesn’t add its own end-to-end encryption on top of your storage; whatever your provider does at rest is what you get for now.
None of this is permanent, it’s just where v0.1 stops. If one of these is a dealbreaker, better you know now than after you’ve moved your notes in — and if you want to help close the gaps faster, feedback and testing genuinely move the needle.
— Marco