September was tough.
One of the challenges of building an e2ee product is that even the most trivial of data model changes requires a client in the middle. Since all of your data is encrypted with your key, your app has to remodel necessary bits of information, encrypt it and send it back to our servers for a migration to fully succeed. We got a taste of this inconvenience for the first time last month. But that's okay because this is a necessary evil that will become easier with time.
Another key learning was that it's time for us to get out of our comfort zones as programmers and to start focusing on Ente's growth. As engineers we are wired to look at most forms of sales and marketing as evil. "If something is great, it will sell itself " is the expectation. But constant feedback and work is required for a product to grow its roots. To garner the former and to afford the latter, we need to grow into unfamiliar roles and find customers who need Ente. This is uncharted territory for us and we look forward to venturing into it.
Moving on, these are some of the product improvements we shipped the last month:
Ability to detect and delete duplicate files to save space (currently it's limited to exact duplicates and not "similar images", we'll iterate on this)
Option to archive files so that you can reduce noise from your timeline
Ability to search and sort albums by their names (search is currently only available on the web, we'll add it to mobile soon)
Option to move and organize files across albums
Frameworks to host our blog and knowledge base.
Multiple "bug fixes and performance improvements"
In the next release we are hoping to polish our interfaces (light-mode included), implement some requested features like public URL sharing and recycle bin, along with some improvements to our photo organizing experience. Some of these are heavy items, so it is hard to commit to a timeline. But we'll do our best to get an improved version of Ente in your hands asap. :)
That's all for now. Time to get back to work.