TL;DR: An android application deleted the local copy of my data after I unsubscribed from the cloud service and was banned from discord for doing uncomfortable questions that other users never considered instead of helping me fix the issue.

First of all, let me introduce myself, I’ve been a self-hosted for 5 or more years. I try to set up everything myself and to build my own ecosystem as many others in this community. Except for an app that I was never able to host myself. An android handwritten app to take notes.

The app I use is notewise.dev, an android good-looking app that offered a cloud subscription to sync my notes. Even though It was against my practices and beliefs I subscribed to keep my two devices synchronized. But the cancellation time has come and I didn’t read their knowledge-base to know that my data will be deleted from the device. They even sent me an email telling me that my cloud data will be deleted in 7 days, and of course, didn’t mention that the data will be gone from the device too.

So here comes the outrageous part, and please bear with me and don’t drill me on how I should have known better. Think that I let my guard down and almost lost years of work. I went to their discord to ask for help to the developers with the following arguments and got banned because more users were joining in the discussion.

1. Why on earth would an app delete the local copy after I unsubscribe? According to them, It’s to help them keep track of whom has a valid plan. They didn’t were able to code It in any other way. This is what to expect with programmers playing wannabe cloud providers.
2. Then They started saying that It’s a bug because It shouldn’t have been deleted from my device until 7 days before the cancellation. So… It’s only half a bug?
3. I would love to provide screenshots of their poor crisis management but was ejected from their discord. According to them, for a cloud provider, It’s totally right to delete the data from your device If you stop paying (imagine dropbox doing that).

I manage cancellations of contracts on a daily basis at work, and going to client devices to unconfigure things or delete data would be criminally liable. So I don’t understand how coding an app that way It’s totally right for these people.

The situation right now: given that I was in the 7-day timeframe to avoid data deletion (from cloud) I reactivated my account. I disconnected It from the internet and I’m backing up my data to PDF’s. I plan on doing a GDPR request to ask for my data and to check If they are compliant.

Although I was angry and frustrated, I tried to ask for help, but having a knowledgeable position and asking for industry standards was too much for them. So I was constantly told to not assume bad intentions from the developers. Bad intentions or not, writing a bug in Freshdesk doesn’t make it a feature.