// the find
ente-io/ente
💚 End-to-end encrypted cloud for everything.
Ente is a fully open-source, end-to-end encrypted cloud platform offering a Google Photos alternative, an Authy replacement (2FA app), and a document/credential locker. It's a monorepo covering Flutter mobile/desktop clients, TypeScript web/desktop apps, and a Go server. Target audience is privacy-conscious individuals and self-hosters who want verifiable E2EE rather than trusting a vendor's claims.
- The cryptography has been audited by three independent firms (Cure53, Symbolic Software, Fallible), and the architecture docs include detailed SVG diagrams explaining key derivation, file encryption, and sharing — rare level of transparency for a consumer product.
- Genuinely complete cross-platform story: iOS, Android, F-Droid, web, Linux, macOS, Windows all ship from one monorepo with separate CI workflows per platform, and the server is self-hostable with Docker.
- The Go server and CLI are cleanly separated, the CLI supports full export/decrypt locally which means your data isn't held hostage even if the service disappears — that's an actual architectural commitment to user ownership.
- Active, high-cadence development with well-structured CI (lint, test, CodeQL, release workflows per product) and Crowdin integration for i18n — the project is run like a real product team, not a weekend side project.
- Self-hosting is notoriously painful — the server requires PostgreSQL, MinIO/S3-compatible storage, and several environment knobs, and community reports indicate the documentation for getting a working local stack lags behind the actual server code changes.
- The monorepo has grown into a maze: Dart mobile code, TypeScript web, TypeScript Electron, Go server, Go CLI, Rust utilities, and docs all coexist, making it hard for a new contributor to know where to start despite the CONTRIBUTING.md.
- The Flutter codebase for Photos is large and historically has had tight coupling between UI and business logic, making it hard to contribute features without understanding a lot of implicit state management context.
- Ente Auth and Photos share account infrastructure but are otherwise separate apps; there's no unified self-hosted admin panel, so managing users, storage quotas, and subscriptions requires direct DB/API manipulation or the CLI, which is a real gap for anyone running a family or small-org instance.