We have built Note Trac very intentionally to be resilient to cancellation from big tech. We appreciate that you can never be completely protected from cancellation but as a politically conservative Christian company we believe it is prudent to do all that can be done to mitigate this risk. One of the ways that we have done this is by building Note Trac as a Progressive Web App or PWA instead of making Note Trac available in either the Apple App Store or Android Google Play store.
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What’s wrong with the app stores?
App stores like the Apple App Store and Android’s Google Play have the ability to cancel your developer account if they do not like something about you. In order to release and maintain an app in these stores you have to have an active developers account. Imagine spending all of that time building a version of NoteTrac.io to be deployed on these app stores to find out one day that our developers account had been suspended making our app unavailable to our users and making it impossible for us to release changes to our app all because we have a different view on something than one of these Big Tech companies.
We came to the conclusion that we could not give that much power over our product to a company that holds to principles that are in direct opposition to the conservative Christian values that our software startup is founded on. In addition to this, the products we are build are intended to compete against products offered by these companies. Further, we compete with these companies in a manner that could be perceived as critical of their business practices because of how we highlight the lack of trust you should have in them due to their unethical handling of the privacy of their users data. For these reasons, it only made sense to try and distance ourselves from being dependant on them to distribute our apps.
Just in case you doubt that this is a real concern, here are a number of examples of different companies being canceled in this very specific way over the past few years.
- Apple and Google Suspend Parler From App Store
- Here’s why Donald Trump’s Truth Social app isn’t on Google Play Store
- Apple Bans Gab from App Development After Company Makes Antitrust Case to DOJ
Where can I download the app?
Because Note Trac is built as a PWA it can be downloaded directly from the Note Trac landing page. And this is the case for both desktop computers as well as smartphone as long as you have a modern browser installed.
Install on Smartphone
In order to download the app on a smartphone, either iPhone or Android, go the the NoteTrac.io Download Page and follow the instructions provided there. These instructions should work for most phones that have a modern browser installed. Sometimes the webapp will also display a message at the bottom of the screen indicating that it can be installed. If this pops up when you go to the NoteTrac.io Landing Page then just accept it and it will install Note Trac on your phone automatically. Either way, the smartphone installation process for the app is pretty straight forward.
Install on Desktop
At the time of writing this post the easiest way to install a PWA onto a desktop computer is to do it through an already installed Chrome type of browser. I’ve heard that it’s possible to install a PWA via the FireFox browser through an extension but since it’s built into Chrome I’m going to explain here how to install Note Trac if you have a Chrome based browser installed. In my case, I use Brave as my regular browser which is built on top of Chrome and so will install Note Trac via my Brave installation.
It is actually extremely simple, here are the instructions:
Navigate to the NoteTrac.io Landing Page in the browser that you’d like to use to install the app on your computer, in my case it’s the brave browser. When you navigate to Note Trac, you will see the following.
Notice the icon circled in the browsers address bar. When you click this icon it will ask you if you would like to install Note Trac as shown in the following screenshot.
Click the install button and Note Trac will be installed onto your computer as it’s own stand alone app that will be available in the list of apps installed on your computer. I run the Linux Pop_OS distribution on my primary desktop computer and as you can see in the following screenshot, NoteTrac is listed in the available apps for my computer.
