Plainva

The mobile app

Last updated: 2026-08-15

Plainva is also available as an app for Android and iOS. It works on the same Markdown files, the same OKF format and the same sync engine as the desktop app — your vault stays identical in both worlds.

Installing the app

The mobile app is in closed beta. On Android you can join in two steps: use plainva.com/android-beta to join the tester group, then opt in on Google Play. On iPhone, distribution runs through TestFlight; the waiting list is at plainva.com.

Google only releases the app to the public Play Store once 12 testers stay in for 14 consecutive days — so joining and simply leaving it installed already helps.

Layout

Reading and editing notes

Notes open rendered and read-only; the pen at the top right switches to editing (with a toolbar above the keyboard: formatting, lists, wiki link, slash commands, insert photo). ![[Note]] embeds appear as tappable preview cards.

The Note details button in the header (between the bookmark and the ⋮ menu) opens the note’s context sheet: properties (directly editable), backlinks, outline, graph and the version history — every edit automatically creates snapshots you can inspect, compare and restore. The Markdown source and in-note search live in the ⋮ menu.

Templates

Templates behave exactly as they do on the desktop: the placeholders ({{title}}, {{date}}, {{daily+1}}, {{weekday:monday}} …) are filled in when the note is created, all of a template’s questions arrive together in one sheet — cancel it and nothing is created — and {{cursor}} places the caret as the note opens.

The folder → template and note type → template rules are set on the desktop; they travel with the settings sync and apply here as well — so a note in Projekte/ starts the same way on both devices, including ＋ capture and + Entry in a database. Two details: {{weekday:…}} always counts from Monday on the phone (the first-day-of-week setting does not exist there yet), and {{clipboard}} asks for the clipboard’s content in the same sheet instead of reading it unasked. The full placeholder list is in Notes and Markdown.

Databases (.base)

.base databases work like on the desktop: every view (table, list, gallery, board, calendar, timeline), typed cell editing, board cards move via press-and-hold. Configure manages views, columns, filters (including groups), sorting and properties.

The calendar view has three periods: month, week, day. The month stays the entry point — it is the only one that still shows a shape on a phone screen; week and day are lists, because seven columns of content stop being readable at that width. An entry spanning several days appears as a bar instead of once per day, and times come before the title. The timeline shows a row per entry with a bar from start to end: both ends can be dragged with a finger, which writes the note’s date field. Under Configure you pick the date and end-date field and colour by — same setting, same file as on the desktop. Relation schemas (targets, cardinality) are still maintained on the desktop.

A Pinboard view shows the notes as a two-column board of sticky cards: tap opens the note, long-press shows the actions (pin, labels, color, delete), dragging after a long press reorders, and checkboxes tick right on the card. The input field on top captures a new note. Tip: point the database at your inbox folder (Settings → Content & structure) and the ＋ quick notes as well as texts shared from other apps land straight on the board.

Tasks

The Tasks area collects every checkbox in your vault — all - [ ] and - [x] lines across all notes, grouped by note. It is the line-based overview a database cannot give you, because a database works on whole notes.

Tapping a task opens the note at that line; the box checks it off and writes back exactly the one [ ]/[x] character. Due dates (📅) and #tags appear as chips so they are not repeated inside the text.

If your vault has a task database (Settings → Content & structure), the area shows it as its own section above: check off, change status, + New task and Open as database. If the database names a provider task list (Configure → Data source → Also create new tasks in — settable here just like on the desktop), the creation sheet also carries a switch Also create in “…”: on, because choosing the list already is the decision, and turned off for the one task that should stay in the vault. A promoted checkbox and a mail captured as a task take the same route. Every checkbox row then also carries To database in its meta line — the line stays as a wiki link, and the task lives on as a note of its own.

Above the list you get the same filters as on the desktop: Folder, Tag, With due date only and Show hidden. Hiding is a property of the note, not of the single task — the eye icon on a note heading writes plainva.tasks: false into that note’s frontmatter and takes it out of the overview; Hide templates does the same for the whole template folder in one go. The file keeps its tasks, they just stop counting. Long-pressing To database picks the target database when your vault has more than one.

A task row gives its title the full width; status, due date, repeat and tags sit below it, and exactly one action sits on the right. Block time (the calendar icon on the right) creates a calendar event for the task when a calendar is connected (date, start, duration, plus the calendar picker when several are writable); Repeat in the meta line creates the next task with a new due date when you check this one off. Both are described under Tasks.

Today

Today is the day surface. The strip at the top selects a day — it runs in both directions, two weeks back and two weeks ahead, and a dot marks every day that already has a daily note. Below it sits the daily note for the selected day (with its template and folder, to open or create), then that day’s appointments and due dates, and finally what you edited on that day.

The middle section brings together what otherwise lives on two surfaces: all-day events first, then the timed ones in clock order, and last the tasks due that day. Tapping a task opens its note. Without a connected calendar and without a task database the section is simply not there.

Tags

The tag list lives under Notes. Tapping opens a tag’s notes; the chevron expands nested tags. Long-pressing a tag offers Rename tag — vault-wide, as on the desktop: Plainva rewrites every note that carries it (in the frontmatter and as #tag in the text, including its tag/child children) and then tells you in how many notes it was replaced. A note that cannot be read or written is skipped — the rest are renamed anyway.

Graph

The vault map shows your vault as nodes and edges. Tapping a folder bubble expands it, tapping a note opens it; the chips above filter by note type, tag and edge kind. Drag a node and the map remembers where you put it — the remembered arrangement lives in .plainva/graph.json and deliberately stays on this device, like the search index.

Long-pressing a node opens its menu: open (or expand/collapse for a folder), Focus on selection and, if the node is pinned, Unpin. Long-pressing an edge names both ends and opens either note. Drag one note onto another and Plainva offers to link them — as a text link at the end of the note, or through a relation of the matching database; a relation that allows exactly one entry asks first, because it replaces the current value. The Select chip turns a drag on empty space into a selection rectangle (a phone has no modifier key); selected notes can be deleted together, through the same confirmation a single one gets. Export as SVG… hands the map to your device’s share sheet.

The same cleaning-up in the small is what the graph in a note’s context sheet does: it shows the open note’s neighbourhood and, below it, suggestions for what else might belong to it. Link places the link at the passage in the text — not at the end of the note — and a dismissed suggestion stays dismissed, even after the note is closed.

The Clean up chip opens the cleanup list: orphans (notes nothing points to), broken links (references into nowhere) and mentions — places where a note is named but not linked. You delete an orphan through the same confirmation as everywhere else, create the missing note for a broken link, and link a mention exactly at the passage rather than at the end of the note. What you dismiss stays dismissed: it does not come back on the next pass. The mention scan reads every note and therefore only starts when you ask it to — and can be stopped at any time.

Focus can also be set from the node menu: the map then shows only its neighbourhood down to the depth you pick (1 to 3). The chip carrying the depth clears the focus again. Two more chips read the map by age: Heatmap tints every node by how recently it changed, and Time travel hides everything newer than the slider — so you can watch the vault grow.

Calendar and events

The Calendar area shows your connected calendars in the Day, 3 days and Agenda views — the same account model as on the desktop. You reach it from the navigation bar or through Areas. Each day column carries its weekday and date at the top, and below it a strip for that day’s all-day events; both scroll away with the grid rather than holding space permanently. Tapping an event opens the event preview as a sheet — the same surface as the floating window on the desktop: time span, location, description, attendees with their answers, and for a series its rhythm along with the next occurrence. For an invitation it offers Accept, Tentative and Decline, with Edit event, Meeting note and Delete event below. Swipe down to close the sheet. Daily notes do not live here — they live in Today.

Manage accounts from the gear icon in the event calendar: connect CalDAV on the device with an app password (e.g. Fastmail, Nextcloud, iCloud); Google and Microsoft follow via browser sign-in. Per account you can show or hide individual calendars.

From an event, Meeting note creates the note that belongs to it — the same note the desktop finds: it carries an anchor to the event, so calling it again reopens it instead of creating a second one, and it lands in the meetings folder. You pick that folder in the accounts area under Calendar settings with a folder browser rather than typing its path; the default calendar for events (the one a new event starts in) sits there too; both belong to the vault and travel with the settings sync. The same place lets you pick, per account, which task lists mirror into your task database.

Signing in is per device. What syncs are your account settings, never the sign-in itself — deliberately so: credentials should not leave the device. An account that arrived through settings sync therefore shows up in the list but carries a sign in marker, with a line underneath telling you what to do. As long as no account is signed in on this device, the calendar and the mailbox explain that in place instead of simply staying empty, and Sign in on this device takes you to the accounts. Signed-in accounts show active. If a sign-in later expires or is revoked, the row says sign-in expired together with the reason — and Sign in again gets it going without removing the account: same account, same calendars.

One login for all services — here too. If a Microsoft or Google account carries several services (files and calendar, say), the Cloud accounts overview offers to merge them into a single sign-in. Afterwards one sign-in keeps every service alive instead of just one — before, a service could keep running while another one of the same account had quietly expired. A Gmail mailbox stays out of it: it runs over IMAP with an app password and needs no consent.

Reminders. Under Calendar settings → Reminders you switch on Remind me of appointments; the phone then asks once for notification permission. Whatever reminder the event itself carries wins — only when it says nothing does Plainva remind you 15 minutes ahead, and all-day events the evening before at 19:00. An event that explicitly wants no reminder gets none. The next 14 days are planned, at most 64 reminders ahead — that is what iOS allows; Plainva refills that window every time you open the app and after every calendar refresh, and tells you from when on a period no longer fits instead of quietly swallowing appointments. The limit that stays: the phone can only announce what it saw at the last sync — an invitation arriving ten minutes before the start no longer reaches a notification.

What you set alongside it. The Lead time applies to appointments without a reminder of their own; All-day appointments decides which evening or morning they speak up. Due tasks additionally takes in the tasks of your task database — with a time like an appointment, without one following the all-day rule. Only these calendars narrows down where reminders come from at all; select nothing and it reads All, and a calendar added later is included by itself. The notification carries two actions: for an appointment Meeting note (creates it, or opens the existing one), for a task Tick off — which completes it right there and, for a repeating task, creates the next one without you opening the app.

Email

Under Settings → Email you connect a Microsoft mailbox (Outlook.com, Microsoft 365) directly through the browser sign-in — no app password needed. As with the calendar, signing in happens per device.

After that you can open Email as its own area from the ▾ next to the title and place it in the navigation bar. The line under the title shows folder, unread count and account, and opens the folder picker. Tap a message to read it; Save as note files it in the Mail folder of your vault (capturing twice opens the same note). Remote images stay blocked until you allow them for that message — a loaded image tells the sender when and where you read.

IMAP mailboxes work on the phone too. Add one under Settings → Email: pick the provider, enter the address and the app password, and Plainva fills in the servers. If your provider is not in the list, Advanced lets you type the IMAP and SMTP host, port and a different user name yourself, and an existing account can be edited later. Selecting several messages works by pressing and holding one of them; after that a tap adds more. In the conversation view, holding or tapping the conversation row picks the whole exchange — and every message in it keeps its own folder, so a reply from Sent is marked there.

An open message offers Reply, Reply all and Forward. A reply quotes the original below your text; “Reply all” additionally picks up the other recipients and leaves out your own address. When composing, Attach file adds a file from the vault — on the phone the vault is the storage you can reach, and everything that arrives on the device (a saved attachment, an inserted photo) already lives there. Each attachment gets its own row with Remove attachment for as long as the message has not gone out.

A message you have started does not have to be sent: Save draft files it in your account’s drafts folder — where every mail program on that mailbox will find it, not in a phone-only place. Which folder that is, the server states; only when it stays silent is the name guessed. In the list, two toggles sit next to the folder line: Unread narrows what is currently loaded (so the count and Load more stay reachable), while Flagged asks the server for every flagged message in the folder — including ones far below the loaded page. In All inboxes the flagged toggle is deliberately absent: that query names exactly one mailbox.

From an open message, three routes lead into the vault: Save as note, → Task in the ⋮ menu (creates an entry in your default task database — with its template, status and the mail’s date) and + .eml, which additionally stores the original message and links to it from the note. All three are anchored: capturing the same mail twice opens what is already there. Delete now also lives in the ⋮ menu rather than beside the back arrow; in the list a swipe is enough. Moving to Trash offers Undo, because it can be taken back — deleting permanently from Trash still asks, because it cannot. And instead of several notices stacked on top of each other there is now one line: the error, else the unreachable accounts (from two on, as a count), else the note about the stored copy.

A note can be sent from its own ⋮ menu: Send note by email (mailto) hands it to the phone’s mail app — Plainva needs no account of its own for that — while Send by mail opens Plainva’s own composer with subject and text.

Sync

The Settings (at the bottom of Notes) lead through Active vault to vault management; that is where you connect cloud storage (WebDAV/Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, S3). Connect to cloud brings an existing cloud vault to the device; Create new vault first asks On this device or With an online service and then the starting structure (empty or a template such as PARA) — the online path continues with connecting, the target folder in the cloud can be created fresh via New folder in the picker sheet, and the structure is uploaded on the first sync. The first run offers the same choice between an existing and a new cloud vault (“Connect to cloud”). Every connection gets its own, separate vault on the device. The vault page shows status, progress, pending transfers and offers Export vault (a ZIP through the share sheet).

The vault page is ordered by what its controls are FOR: a status card at the top answers the one question you open this page with — is it running? (state, last run, pending transfers and interval in one line). Below it come named groups — Connection, Contents — and at the bottom, behind its own edge, the Danger zone with Disconnect sync and Delete vault. Before, up to nine identical buttons sat in one row, with Restore deleted files directly beside Delete vault.

Under Contents, next to Export vault, there is now the automatic vault backup: one ZIP of the whole vault per day, of which the last seven are kept by default (Retained backups); Back up now creates one immediately. The archives live in the device’s documents, not in the cache — something the operating system may empty at any time is not an archive. A phone gets no background alarm: the check runs when you open the app and whenever you return to it, so the backup catches up rather than running at a set hour. The line under the switch therefore says when it last ran — that is how a backup that quietly never happens becomes visible. Until now the phone only had the manual export, so a vault nobody thought to export had no archive at all.

How often this vault checks the remote for changes is set on the same page (sync interval, at least 5 seconds) — local saves are uploaded immediately regardless. For Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and S3 the cloud folder can also be changed later; with WebDAV the folder is part of the server address, so you reconnect instead. If settings sync is encrypted you can additionally turn on Ask for the passphrase on every start: the key is then never stored on the device. And Security & Sharing now states plainly that encrypted workspaces are experimental and have not been independently reviewed — keep your recovery file and code somewhere safe.

The vault page also states whether your settings travel with you — as a card with a clear state rather than a bare button:

Each card also names what does not travel: sign-ins always stay on the device (see Calendar and events).

Settings → Security & Sharing names what the connection actually is — and for a plain cloud vault it sets up the encrypted workspace right on the phone (identity → recovery file and code → activation). Without a cloud connection there is nothing to encrypt, and the area says so.

Both setups — the encrypted workspace and the sync passphrase — now run as their own flow, without the navigation bar: while one is open there is exactly one way out, and it asks. That is not decoration. Until the final step your key exists only in memory, and leaving discards it; before, a tap on the bar could do that without a word. The last step shows a progress bar where there is something to count — the workspace re-encrypts every file, while the sync passphrase is two writes, and inventing a percentage for the second would be a lie in the shape of a bar.

Shares are managed here now, not only on the desktop: under People & permissions you invite a member with a role (Invite creates them — you pair their device afterwards), create a group, and change a group’s role right in its row. Under Slices you create a share for a Folder. Deliberately not on the phone: slices built from a free selection or a dynamic rule — both would need surfaces that do not exist here — and rekeying, ownership transfer and decommissioning, which stay on the desktop for now.

Safety net

Snapshots (version history), a draft journal (after a crash the note offers your last unsaved state) and conflict copies with a comparison view protect your data. Retention is configured under Settings → Backup & version history.

If someone changes the same note elsewhere while you are typing here, Plainva preserves your version as a copy next to it and adopts the one that arrived. That now sits on the note and stays until you resolve it: a notice above the text names the copy’s path, opens it, and shows the differences on request. It used to be a message that faded after seconds — and the save kept retrying, so every round wrote another copy. Exactly one is written now.

When you delete a folder, the prompt names how many files are inside — the number is on the button as well. Plainva snapshots every file in it first, and you can bring those back under Settings → Maintenance → Restore deleted files. The dialog states one limit openly: only what this phone has written at least once can be preserved. A note that merely arrived through synchronisation and was never edited here exists in no snapshot. Unlike the desktop, a phone has no system trash to catch that. If the deletion affects more than ten files, or more than a fifth of the vault, Plainva asks a second time — exactly as the desktop does.

Sharing and shortcuts

On Android and iOS, shared text and URLs become a new note in the inbox folder; shared images and files are taken over as attachments (up to 25 MB per file). On Android, long-pressing the app icon additionally offers New note and Today.

Folders, photos, and calendar

The floating Plus button remains available inside nested folders, and every quick-create action creates in the folder you have open — new folders included. The ⋮ in the header belongs to the open object instead: it shows that object’s actions, never the app settings.

The editor photo button offers Take photo or Choose from library, preserves the insertion point, and reports permission or file errors visibly. Photos land in the vault’s attachments folder — the same one your computer uses.

Events and daily notes are deliberately separate: Calendar shows the connected calendars (see Calendar and events), Today shows the daily note of a chosen day. There is no local month view of daily notes — the strip in Today does that job.

Attachments and images

Besides notes and databases the navigator now shows attachments — images, PDFs, whatever else lies in the folder. An image opens inside Plainva; everything else is handed to the system, which knows what a PDF is and Plainva does not. Share passes a file to any other app.

A note’s ⋮ menu carries Export as Markdown…: it hands the file itself to the system share sheet, where you find Print, “Save to Files” and every editor you have installed. Share above it sends only the note’s text.

Swiping

Swipe a row left to reveal its actions: Bookmark and Delete on a note, Rename and Delete folder on a folder, Delete on a database and in the mailbox. They are the same actions the row offers in its menu (long press) — the swipe is the shorter way there, never the only one. The first time, a line above the list says so; you tap it away, and it appears exactly once per vault.

Deleting asks through the same dialog as everywhere else. While you are selecting several rows, swiping is off — a gesture that means exactly one row has no clear meaning next to a selection you are still assembling. With conversations on in the mailbox, a swipe on a conversation means the WHOLE conversation (instead of an undo it then tells you how many messages it was); an expanded single message still swipes on its own. Task rows have no swipe actions — they carry their controls visibly on the row.

On wide screens

The app follows the window width, not the device name:

On a tablet, or a large phone turned sideways, you get the same spatial model as on the desktop — navigate on the left, work in the middle — instead of a blown-up phone.

Databases in the calendar

Above the calendar views sits a row of chips: every .base view of type calendar or timeline that names a date column can be shown there. Shown entries appear among the appointments in the day and agenda lists — with a diamond and a dashed edge, so a note never looks like an appointment; in the month grid as a hollow dot. A tap opens the note.

The selection belongs to the vault, not to the device: what you show on your computer is here once settings sync has run. Scheduling on the phone happens through the entry’s sheet — dragging stays on the computer.

The other way round, a database’s calendar view can show the number of real appointments for a day in the corner of its cell — so you can see what you are planning against.