Show HN: Onin – E2EE calendar and chat app

Show HN: Onin – E2EE calendar and chat app(onin.co)

19 points by brod_ie 3 years ago | 17 comments

Hey HN!

Ryan here (co-founder of YC-backed Muzz). I’m now building Onin, an end-to-end encrypted calendar and chat app that makes organising your personal and social life simple and secure.

I’ve been building technology businesses for 10+ years and have witnessed the reoccurring problem that digital calendars were built for companies, not people. They feel cold, transactional, and anti-social — not the thing of dreams for planning your personal life. They also lack the security we now come to expect from consumer products.

Onin is the first calendar to be fully E2EE, protecting not just your events, but your messages and even your profile. Unlike existing E2EE calendars, you cannot share Onin events to others without the protection of E2EE. When you consider how much personal information your calendar stores about you and your loved ones’ lives, we think this is essential.

With such a focus on security and privacy, it’s only fitting that we host our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service on GitHub to be as transparent as possible with our users.

But beyond security, how is Onin so different?

Our research found that 84% of events are planned entirely in chats. But our calendars are disconnected from these conversations, leaving our schedules constantly out of sync.

To fix this, we’ve collapsed and combined calendar and chat into one secure app, eliminating the fragmentation between events and the conversations that form them.

Some of our unique features include:

- Calendar keyboard: Access your calendar from within the chat

- Event chats: Creating a new event generates a dedicated chat

- Just phone numbers: No more searching for your friend’s email

- End-to-end encryption: All our events and chats are E2EE, even your profile too

Onin is proudly the world’s most private calendar by default:

- End-to-end encrypted events, profiles, and messages

- Two-Factor Authentication required

- Chat without revealing your phone number

- (Coming soon) Your unique link to invite people, no need to share your number

We’re exactly 4 weeks away from launching the public beta to our waitlist community. You can check out all the features we have coming here and join too at the link above.

I’d love to hear your feedback and answer any questions!

Gys 3 years ago |

> With such a focus on security and privacy, it’s only fitting that we host our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service on GitHub to be as transparent as possible with our users.

I would value if you are just as transparent on how you will make money.

brod_ie 3 years ago | |

Important question, thank you for asking! We will never monetise through means that jeopardise the privacy of our users. We want to monetise from % fees on payments and event ticket sales (pay-to-join events) in our B2B2C use case.

whatsthatabout 3 years ago | |

Also I don't get why GitHub is fitting as a hoster? Because of git and the commit history? Definitely not because of their strong believes in privacy as a company owned by microsoft...

brod_ie 3 years ago | | |

Exactly for the commit history: we want to make our legal agreements, and any changes made to them, as transparent as possible, we thought GitHub was the most accessible place to do this

n89nanda 3 years ago |

Good concept and congrats on the launch. My feedback is I don't see why I would move my conversations( and convincing all my friends) from existing apps like iMessage, Discord, Slack etc to new app just coz of a calendar feature. Who is the target customer for this service? Discord, Slack and iMessage have many apps that can be used to schedule events. I think it would make more sense if this a SaaS offering where I could use this in other platforms as an app or a bot.

brod_ie 3 years ago | |

Thank you! We totally agree, behaviour change is hard: no doubt our public beta feature set will appeal best to our core fans but the hooks will get more and more compelling to mainstream consumers as we develop the product.

It's not so much about moving all your conversations to Onin though: it's about using us as your personal and social calendar. We support showing/editing your existing calendar events in-app too so there's zero switching cost to trying us.

With this in mind, we've found this feature set to be very compelling with our non-technical friends and family who are on the private beta.

Sorry for the multiple edits :)

fader 3 years ago |

There's not much detail on the page, but from the screenshots I'm guessing this is mobile only? (Guessing iOS only but maybe there just aren't Android screenshots...)

Mobile app only systems are a huge pain (literally) for me as due to some wrist issues, typing on a tiny screen instead of an ergonomic keyboard is difficult.

brainchild-adam 3 years ago | |

Tangent here, and possibly not helpful, but just in case: I use handwriting (Gboard includes this) with a cheap touch pen on my mobile b/c I hate typing on these screens. Works like a charm (in comparison).

brod_ie 3 years ago | |

I'm afraid as you guessed it, iOS-only for launch on Jan 10th but we want to get Android and web as quickly as we find product market fit (PMF). This decision is so we can iterate and improve the product based on our users feedback as quickly as possible, the more platforms we support the slower can move. We suspect though we're going to hear this a lot more and PMF for a new calendar service might only be possible with apps on all your devices!

fader 3 years ago | | |

There's always the option of building a web app.

If you're iOS only I suspect the chances that you'll build a Linux app to be roughly zero, but web apps work almost anywhere :)

tomjen3 3 years ago |

First of all, best of luck with your idea and company.

Do I understand it correctly that you assume the people I plan with are also using the chat?

brod_ie 3 years ago | |

In the ideal scenario yes but they don't have to be: you can use Onin as a modern, E2EE personal calendar on your own. We're seeing the most common pattern in the private beta for people to plan on existing chat services and then move the event into Onin once arranged, effectively replacing the legacy email invite system of current calendars. From there the Onin event becomes the destination for the continued planning/chatting/sharing photos etc.

OctopusLupid 3 years ago |

Getting a 406 Not Acceptable.

brod_ie 3 years ago | |

Sorry to hear that: is this on the Typeform? Feel free to email ryan [at] onin [dot] co and I can manually add you to the waitlist, thanks