Easy Notes

Easy Notes, also branded Athena in the project artwork, is an open-source notes app by Kin69. It keeps its own local database instead of asking you to choose a document folder. That makes it quick for personal notes and widgets, but unlike Markor the notes are not ordinary Markdown files that another editor can open directly.

Notes, pictures and widgets

• Markdown editing and preview. Notes can use headings, lists, links and other Markdown formatting, with a rendered preview.
• Images. You can add pictures selected from the phone. The main note editor copies them without a file-size limit to the app-specific external-files directory, which is outside the encrypted vault. On Android 9 and older, another app granted broad storage permission may be able to read that location. Separately, the note widget omits a picture when its decoded bitmap reaches 15,552,000 bytes; that is not a selection limit in the editor. Gallery Sync is on by default, but its observer runs only while Easy Notes is running. When Android reports any change to a gallery image—not only deletion—it removes an app copy with the matching number in its filename. Editing, favouriting or renaming an original may also send such a notification, so turn Gallery Sync off or keep a separate backup of important pictures.
• Organisation. Notes can be searched and pinned, and a text file can be imported as a new note.
• Two widgets. One opens a new note and another shows selected notes on the home screen.
• Appearance. It offers dynamic colour, light and dark themes, custom colours, a font-size control and an optional monospaced editing font, plus several languages. It does not provide a typeface picker.

There is no web account, collaboration, browser editor or automatic device-to-device sync. The APK has no internet permission. If you need notes as visible files in a Syncthing folder, Markor is the closer fit; if you need a notes service across desktop and mobile, Joplin covers that different use case.

App lock, vault and backups are separate

The app lock controls entry to the app with a passcode, pattern or Android biometrics. The vault is different: it encrypts the title and body of vault notes in the database with AES-GCM. The source derives that key by hashing the password once with SHA-256, without a salt or deliberately slow KDF. AES-GCM protects the ciphertext from unnoticed modification, but the key derivation makes password strength especially important. The password is kept in memory only for the current vault session. Image files referenced by a vault note are outside the title/body encryption path.

Manual export is different again. Version 1.7-fdroid places only the Room database in the exported ZIP. Encryption is off by default, so you must enable Encrypt backup before export for the app to ask for a password; otherwise the ZIP is plaintext. With encryption enabled, it derives a key with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 using a random salt and 65,536 iterations, then encrypts with AES-CBC. The format does not add a separate authentication tag, and it still omits the image directory. Restore replaces the current database instead of merging notes. Treat export as a way to move the note database, not as a complete media backup or a substitute for keeping important originals.

Although Easy Notes itself cannot connect to the internet, its Android manifest leaves system backup enabled. Its cloud-backup rules are empty, and it defines no separate device-transfer exclusions, so the operating system’s backup or transfer mechanism may copy eligible database, image and settings data. Those settings include the app-lock passcode or pattern stored as plain values. The system controls available for backup vary by Android version, device maker and backup transport; Easy Notes has no in-app control to exclude its data.

The settings screen describes import and export as “NextCloud • Local • Encryption”, but the source has no Nextcloud client or sync path. In this build, “Local” export and restore are the implemented transfer mechanism.

About this file

• This is the F-Droid variant of version 1.7 (version name 1.7-fdroid, version code 14), built from the source tagged 1.7.1. The F-Droid APK is byte for byte the EasyNotes.apk attached to that GitHub release. Both the F-Droid and Play flavours use com.kin.easynotes; this file carries the developer certificate fingerprint published in the README and pinned as F-Droid’s allowed signer, so it can update older F-Droid or GitHub-release installations signed with that certificate. The Play listing returned 404 when checked on 27 October 2026, so we could not verify its current signing certificate. Export your database and keep the original pictures before switching sources; if Android reports a signature conflict, uninstalling the old app would remove its app data.
• The 3.9 MB APK needs Android 8.0 or later and includes ARM and x86 native libraries in both 32- and 64-bit forms.
• Our manifest and static scans found three permissions: Android biometric authentication, legacy fingerprint authentication and the app’s internal AndroidX dynamic-receiver permission. They found no tracker code and no storage, camera, microphone or internet permission.
• Easy Notes is GPL-3.0-or-later. The six F-Droid screenshots were committed on 16 July 2024, before the interface redesign shipped in the 1.7.1 source, so they show an older workflow rather than the current screen layout.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one.