Stay well away! - extremely vague privacy and terms

Fiinote in principle offers you note-taking and sync. It piqued my interest because it claims to implement AES-256 encryption, which has the whiff of a privacy-conscious service.

But when you look through their Terms or Privacy Policy, you find nothing of any substance, except for the extremely generic guff about how important your privacy is and how they will definitely comply with the law. But not even one (not one!) mention of where your data would be stored, or where Fiinote is based, legally, physically or otherwise.

So I looked up Fiinote's WhoIs record. The domain name for their email contact, fiistudio.com, is registered by someone seemingly called YuMing of Nexperian Holdings Limited in Hangzhou, China. The registrar is HiChina Zhicheng Technology Ltd. Surprise.

Fiinote does not explain how their encryption is supposedly implemented. It is not an open source app. It does not explain where they are based or to which legal jurisdiction they belong. But then I find out that it's in a country renowned for hugely restricted internet access freedoms and whose government runs a near totalitarian state predicated on a Big Brother like monitoring of everyone's physical and online activity (see, e.g. see here and here.

And I'm supposed to trust them with my private notes and data? And install their software on my devices? If you agree to that, you deserve what you get. Stay far away from Fiinote and its ilk.

Awful UI! Despite its various functions, it took me so much time to navigate myself in the app. Nearly every button is on the most awkward place. And it's 2022 now but they are still developing it based on Android 2.2! I know sometimes for compatibility purpose but I really hate that ugly GUI design.

Worth to say that I'm writing this review after @JohnFastman. Here I try to stick to GUI since his review is detailed enough in my opinion.

GUI

I have used Fiinote on my last 3 Android phones for lecture notes and basic stuff that are not sensitive (Don't trust unless you have read the code). The user interface (UI) on Android is amazingly good. the designers have spent time on understanding the basic needs of note taking. the buttons are large, selecting text is easiest among all Android apps I have seen since 2011. You can easily increase the font size of a selected text just by dragging an icon that appears after selecting a text.

The handwriting feature is also very good. you can write what you want and Fiinote understands it as handwritten text, so then you can highlight, change color, change fontsize but all of these by keeping your own handwriting.

it has a good search function that goes through all notes. It used to even search in the handwritten texts but I tried it couple of minutes ago before starting this review and it does not work anymore (hope it is a bug and they fix it in the next version)

[Edited by mehradmahmoudian, July 03]

[Edited by mehradmahmoudian, July 03]