Questions, answered.

Your devices find each other through the Hyperswarm distributed network and open a direct, end-to-end encrypted connection — no middleman ever stores or relays your notes. When two of your devices are online at the same time, changes replicate between them immediately. Until then, every edit waits safely on the device where you made it.

Nothing is lost — each device keeps its own full history and syncs the moment both sides can reach each other. Background sync widens that window for you: on mobile the app can wake periodically to catch up, and on desktop closing the window leaves Pear Notes running in the tray. So the overlap usually happens without you arranging it.

Yes, and you choose how much. Mobile offers three modes — off, periodic background sync that the system wakes occasionally for minimal battery impact, or always-on with a persistent notification. On desktop, closing the window keeps the app alive in the tray. Set it to off and syncing only ever happens while you have the app open.

Not unless you let it. Photos, videos, and file attachments are held automatically while you are on a cellular connection, and you can pause media transfers entirely at any time — notes, folders, and settings are tiny and keep syncing regardless. Held items resume on their own once you are back on Wi-Fi. Every transfer is listed with its own progress, and you can pause, resume, or cancel any of them.

As many as you like. Every paired device holds a complete encrypted copy of your notes and can sync with any other. Your phone, laptop, and desktop all stay in step without a hub in the middle.

Pairing uses a cryptographic blind handshake: you scan a QR invite (or paste an invite code), both devices verify each other's identity keys, and you can compare fingerprints on both screens to rule out man-in-the-middle attacks. The inviting device must explicitly confirm before the new device is admitted.

Yes. Open Linked Devices on any of your devices to view, rename, or remove others. A removed device is cut off from future changes.

If you have another paired device, your notes are already on it — pair a replacement device to it and you're back. If it was your only device, restore from an encrypted .pnbk backup with your backup password. Without either, the data is gone: there's no server copy to recover from, by design. Export backups regularly.

Really. No accounts, no analytics, no crash reporters, no ads, no tracking pixels. The app has no servers of ours to talk to, so there's nowhere for your data to go. Everything lives encrypted on your devices and moves only between them.

Notes are stored in an AES-256 encrypted database, and attachments — photos, videos, voice notes, scans — live in an encrypted media vault. Nothing is written to disk in the clear, and an isolated streaming server renders media without leaking unencrypted caches.

There is no reset. The backup's encryption key is derived from your password, and we never see either — that's what makes the backup safe to store anywhere. It also means nobody, including us, can unlock it for you. Treat your backup password like the keys to a safe.

Lock any note from its menu and it can only be opened with your device biometrics — Face ID, Touch ID, fingerprint, Windows Hello — or a custom lock password that is enforced on every paired device. While a locked note is open, screenshots and screen capture are blocked and the app hides its content in the task switcher. Repeated wrong passwords trigger escalating wait times.

No — and not as a promise, as an architecture. Notes are encrypted on your device with keys that never leave your devices, and they travel only over direct device-to-device channels. There is no point in the system where we could read them even if we wanted to.

No. Every AI feature runs on your device using a model you download once — there is no API key, no account, and no request to send. Your notes, recordings, and photos are processed locally and never uploaded, which is also why the features keep working with no connection at all.

Six things, each a separate switch: voice typing that turns speech into text as you talk; transcripts for voice recordings; text extraction from photos, scans, and PDFs; short descriptions of images; summaries, key points, suggested titles, and rewrites of selected text; and translation between English and 48 other languages. You can also ask a question about a note and get an answer from that note alone.

No. When you ask for a change, it shows you the exact edits it proposes — each one as the old text and the new text — and nothing happens until you apply them. Applied changes can be undone like any other edit, and rewrites and translations always preview before they replace anything.

It depends on what you turn on. Speech is 44 MB to 400 MB depending on the quality you pick, text extraction about 100 MB, image descriptions about 412 MB, and the model behind summaries and rewrites 382 MB or 1 GB. Translation downloads only the languages you actually use, at 13–44 MB each. Downloads can wait for Wi-Fi, can be paused, and every model can be deleted later to free the space.

Yes, and the app says so where it matters. Transcripts mishear names and punctuation, summaries can miss details, image descriptions can be inaccurate, and translations lose nuance when they pivot through English. Everything is shown to you for review before it goes into a note. These are small models running on a phone or laptop, not a datacenter.

A physical device running iOS 17, Android 12 (64-bit), or macOS 14 or later. Devices with less memory can still use the lighter models; the largest ones need more headroom. If your device can't run it, everything else in Pear Notes works exactly as usual.

It is off until you turn it on — every feature individually. The setting lives on that device and is never synced, so turning it on for your laptop doesn't turn it on for your phone. Models are excluded from backups and sync, and AI actions are hidden entirely on locked notes.

Completely. Pear Notes is offline-first: reading, writing, attachments, and voice notes all work with no connection at all. The network is only used when your devices sync with each other.

Photos and videos from your camera or library, scanned documents, voice recordings with waveform playback, and arbitrary files like PDFs. Attachments are encrypted alongside the note, sync between devices, and can be previewed, shared, or saved from inside the app.

No artificial limits — you're bounded only by your device's storage. The built-in Storage screen shows exactly how much space your notes, images, videos, voice notes, and files use, broken down per note, so nothing is a mystery. It also reports what is reclaimable — disk space still held by attachments you have deleted — and frees it on request.

Yes. The activity log records what each of your devices created, edited, renamed, moved, or deleted, and any note has its own history. Open an entry to see the exact lines that changed, with the device that changed them. Recording can be turned off, entries can be kept for as long as you choose, and clearing the log clears it on every linked device.

Yes. Share photos, videos, files, links, or text from any app and Pear Notes takes them in — pick the note to add them to, or start a new one. Everything that arrives lands in the same encrypted vault as anything you create in the app.

It moves to Recently Deleted for 30 days, on every one of your devices, so a mistake on one device isn't final everywhere else. You can restore it any time in that window, or delete it permanently yourself. After 30 days it is removed for good.

Pear Notes is available today on Android (Google Play, or a universal APK from GitHub Releases), Windows (Microsoft Store), macOS (the Mac App Store, or a .dmg for Apple silicon from GitHub Releases), and Linux (.deb and .rpm packages from GitHub Releases). iOS is in App Store review and uses the same peer-to-peer backend, so all your devices will sync together the moment it arrives.