Think about what's in your notes app right now. Passwords. Addresses. Medical info. Bank account numbers. Business ideas. Journal entries you'd never want anyone else to read.
Now think about where those notes are stored — and whether anything is protecting them.
If the answer is "I'm not sure," that's exactly the problem.
Your Notes Are a Goldmine
Most people don't think of their notes app as sensitive. It's not a banking app. It's not email. But look at what actually ends up in there:
- Wi-Fi passwords and account credentials
- Social Security numbers and ID info
- Medical notes and prescriptions
- Business ideas and financial plans
- Personal journal entries and private thoughts
- Addresses, phone numbers, contacts
This is some of the most valuable data on your phone. And for most people, it's sitting in an app with zero encryption.
What Can Go Wrong
Your phone gets stolen. If your notes aren't encrypted, anyone who gets past your lock screen has everything. Lock screens can be bypassed — encryption can't.
Your cloud account gets breached. If your notes sync to the cloud, they're only as secure as your account password. One phishing email, one reused password from a data breach — and your notes are exposed.
Someone borrows your phone. You hand it to a friend to show them a photo. They swipe into your notes app. Maybe intentionally, maybe not. If there's no PIN lock, everything's visible.
An app has too many permissions. Some apps request broad storage access. If your notes are stored as plain text, other apps could potentially access them.
What Encryption Actually Does
AES-256 encryption scrambles your data so it's unreadable without the correct key. Even if someone gets physical access to your phone's storage — pulls the files directly — they see garbled data, not your notes.
The critical detail: where is the encryption key stored?
If the key lives on a company's server, they can decrypt your data whenever they want. If the key lives on your device in a hardware-secured area (like the Android Keystore), only your phone can decrypt it. No one else holds a copy.
That's the difference between "we encrypt your data" and actual privacy.
What to Look For in a Notes App
If privacy matters to you, here's the baseline:
- AES-256 encryption at rest — notes are encrypted on the device, not just during transfer
- Device-only key storage — the encryption key stays on your phone, ideally in a hardware-backed keystore
- No cloud requirement — if there's no server, there's nothing to breach
- No account required — no email or phone number means no identity tied to your data
- PIN lock or biometric lock — a second barrier before anyone can open the app
Anything less, and you're betting that nothing will ever go wrong.
How Scrib Handles This
I built Scrib to meet every one of those requirements. Here's how it works:
Two layers of encryption. Every note is automatically AES-256 encrypted the moment it's saved — that's the base layer, always on, no setup required. On top of that, you can toggle per-note encryption for your most sensitive notes, adding a second layer of AES-256 protection.
The encryption key is generated on your phone and stored in the Android Keystore — a hardware-backed secure area that other apps can't access. Scrib never connects to the internet. There is no server. No sync. No networking code in the app at all.
You can also set a PIN lock for the whole app and move sensitive notes into a Private Vault — a separate, hidden space only accessible with your PIN.
Zero data collected. No account needed. Just encrypted notes on your device.
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