Habo 4.0 Is Here: Your Habits, on Every Device, and Only Yours

After months of heads-down work, I’m shipping Habo 4.0 — and it’s the biggest release in the project’s history.

The headline feature is Habo Sync: a full cross-device synchronization engine built from the ground up with one non-negotiable constraint — your habit data stays completely private, and completely yours.

Here’s everything that’s new.

☁️ Habo Sync — Finally, and Done Right

Sync has been the most-requested feature for a long time. I held off because I wasn’t willing to do it the lazy way: storing your data in plaintext on a server I control, asking you to just trust me.

So I built something better.

Habo Sync is Zero-Knowledge and End-to-End Encrypted. Before your data ever leaves your device, it is encrypted locally using your Master Password. That encrypted blob is what gets stored and synced. Our servers — or anyone who might ever access them — see only ciphertext. We genuinely cannot read your habits, your notes, or your streaks. Not even if we wanted to.

That means:

• Your habit data is encrypted on-device before upload
• Only you, with your Master Password, can decrypt it
• We have zero access to your plaintext data

Mark that off your threat model.

🛡️ Secure Cloud Backups

Phones get lost. Phones get broken. It happens to everyone eventually.

With Habo 4.0, losing your device no longer means losing months (or years) of habit history. Secure Cloud Backups run silently in the background, keeping an encrypted snapshot of your data ready to restore — in seconds — onto any new device.

Your streaks survive the chaos of real life.

🚀 Full Self-Hosting Support

We’re an open source project, and I take that seriously.

Habo 4.0 ships with official, first-class self-hosting support. If you’d rather run your own backend than use mine, you can. Deploy your own Supabase instance, point the app at your server, and you have complete data sovereignty — no subscription needed, no dependency on me whatsoever.

I’ve written detailed self-hosting guides to make this as painless as possible. Whether you’re running it on a Raspberry Pi at home or a VPS in your preferred region, the path is well-documented and well-supported.

This is what open source should look like.

✨ Everything Else in 4.0

Beyond sync, this release packs in a wave of quality-of-life work:

Improved localization (i18n): All new sync flows, emails, and security prompts are fully localized. We’ve continued our commitment to making Habo genuinely usable for a global community, not just English speakers.

Rewritten error handling: When something goes wrong — a flaky connection, a sync conflict, a timeout — you’ll now get clear, actionable guidance instead of a cryptic error code. We rewrote the underlying error handling from scratch.

Performance improvements: We’ve made a wave of under-the-hood optimizations throughout the app. Habit notes are now capped at 400 characters, which not only keeps things focused but meaningfully speeds up sync operations.

How to Get It

Update Habo from your app store. If you’re setting up sync for the first time, you’ll be walked through Master Password setup on first launch.

Hosted sync is available as a subscription. It funds continued development of the app and keeps the project sustainable.

Self-hosting is free, forever. Instructions are in the self-hosting guide in the repository.

A Note on What I Built

This release took a long time because I refused to cut corners on the privacy architecture. Zero-knowledge E2EE isn’t the easy path — it’s the right one.

Habo is a one-person project, but it’s made better by many. Thank you to every contributor who filed issues, opened PRs, and pushed the codebase forward — and a special thank you to the incredible translator community on Weblate who make Habo genuinely usable for people all around the world. You’re a huge part of why this project exists.

Now go check off some habits.

— Peter