Hello friends! We have a variety of product updates in queue for you, and we've not been sitting still!
It's been a few months - I think our last blog post was early in the summer, and while we did take a bit of time off from AutoButler, we've still managed to get a fair amount done, including a rebrand…
Meet Quark
Quark is the new flagship product for AutoButler, LLC.
We are keeping the company name and website at autobutler.org, but we have a new website for our product itself. Increasingly we are realizing that we want to do so much more than just make these data storage solutions; additionally, we had some notable problems with getting our app into the Apple app store under the name "Autobutler" (apparently someone else had the idea of naming their car wash the same thing, and Apple won't let you have the same name as anyone else; I can't help but imagine this is a major part of why we get tech products with ridiculous names) - so we took inspiration from some of our fellow, more reasonable privacy-focused tech companies and named our product Quark.
Why "Quark"
Not only is Quark small as a physical product, but a large collection of them together comprises a broader "thing"; for those who aren't nerds, a "quark" is the smallest part of an atom. We like building things, and we believe that cultural change usually comes from many small changes rather than one or two major lightning-strike moments.
What We've Been Building
We have a blog coming soon that's got all the new features of the device - we rewrote the backend, have made MASSIVE performance improvements on the Photos library and continue finding ways to make that better, added useful Search features, added a Password Vault that allows you to back up your passwords at home across devices (something no other similar product offers, by the way), and… A MOBILE APP! Yes, we are beta testing the iOS and Android applications now! All this, with notable security improvements to block brute force attacks and more.
When You Can Get One
We're eager to share our work with you, and are looking at a friends-and-family limited run of an at-cost release in early February. Our goal is to delete our own Google accounts in November and stress-test the thing. We did have a setback with the original hardware we wanted to use, but we'd rather get this RIGHT than have the devices die on users.
As always, we love you all and are so excited to build stuff, and we want to build stuff for you. Feel free to reach out anytime.
Grace and peace, Brandon and James (and not Claude! we write these ourselves!)