Although Google aims to view and edit apps for Android’s default image, Photos App has become one of the most popular photo backup services around for years. In fact, this is one of the most attractive products in years Stop providing unlimited storage 2020.
This change in the strategy of tech giants leaves some room for other photo backups Growth services and show people their products. Especially for those who don’t want to hand over their lives’ photos to big tech companies, a privacy-focused photo backup service becomes very attractive. That’s where Ente comes in.
Open source project by former Google employee Vishnu Mohandas Ente (It means “mine” in Malayalam) End-to-end encryption Photo storage across various platforms – This means the service simply cannot access photos of its users. The startup says it stores photos in three different locations for increased reliability and access, and the open source nature of the project means that anyone can check the code and even rotate their own servers to securely store their pictures.
The company says all its user-oriented features are processed on the device — such as processing of features that identify faces and locations, create topics and curate memories — done locally — and synchronize processed information with other devices using end-to-end encryption. You can also search for photos in natural language, such as “Beach Sunset in India”.
The service offers a web client as well as Android, iOS and desktop applications, and offers 5GB of free storage. Users can pay plans for a $9.99 monthly storage of 1TB and can share an account with five people.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Mohandas said that despite using many Google products, including photos, the company’s privacy practices made him uncomfortable.
“Google takes security seriously, but it’s not user privacy. They don’t really care about customer data or what it means about it. In hindsight, it’s not surprising because they’re an advertising company,” Mohandas said. He ended up trying Apple and Dropbox, but wasn’t happy with their interface, or how difficult it was to access images on different platforms and devices.
Boottrapt’s Ente claims it has more than 150,000 registered customers who collectively store more than 165 million photos on the app. Despite being traction, Mohadas said the company has not yet had any ambitions to seek venture capital.
“The cost of closing companies like us is really high, because all of our customers need to cancel their data. We don’t want to take risks at the moment and try to get growth in ways that could lead to our closure,” Mohandas said.
He said the open source community around Ente is strong, with all 12 employees previously being part of the community. The company also provides dedicated support for people who want to self-host apps.
Mohandas realized that privacy features weren’t enough to sell such services, and said Ente tried to keep features balanced with services like Google Photos. The startup is also considering launching an Android app that does not require a user to log in and provides photo classification locally.
