Scrib 2.2.1 for Android: Missing Notes Come Back

By · · 9 min read

Scrib is a free encrypted notes app for Android: AES-256 on the device, no account, no cloud, no tracking. Version 2.2.1 went live on Google Play on July 25, 2026, at 100% rollout in all 177 countries, and it is the first release built around getting something back rather than adding something new.

Play users are coming from 2.1.0. Version 2.2.0 was never uploaded to Play, so this update carries both sets of changes at once. Everything below is Android; nothing here concerns iOS.

If Scrib ever opened empty, your notes were probably never gone

A number of people upgrading to 2.1.0 saw one of two things. Either a message reading "Storage Error: Unable to initialize storage. Please free up space and restart the app", or, on the next launch, the welcome screen, as though they had just installed Scrib for the first time.

That message was wrong. It had nothing to do with free space, and the notes were still on the phone the entire time.

Here is what actually happened. Scrib 2.1.0 moved notes from an unencrypted store into an encrypted one. It read every note out of the old file, closed it, then wrote the same note objects into the new encrypted file. The storage library binds an object to the file it was read from, and closing that file does not release the binding, so the very first write threw an error instead of saving.

That error landed above the write, which means two things happened together. Nothing was written to the encrypted file, and the step that deletes the old file never ran. So the app ended up with an empty encrypted file and a completely intact old one sitting right next to it.

On the next launch Scrib checked whether it needed to migrate by asking whether the new file existed. It did exist. It was zero bytes, but it existed. So the migration never tried again, the app opened the empty file, found no notes and no saved settings, and showed onboarding. To the person holding the phone this is indistinguishable from a wipe. On disk it was nothing of the sort: in reproduction, the old file was 208,782 bytes of notes while the encrypted one was 0.

What 2.2.1 does about it

On first launch, Scrib now reconciles the two files by content rather than by a marker. It reads whatever is in the old file, copies across every note the encrypted store is missing, and restores the settings that went missing with them, including the flag that remembers you already completed onboarding.

Then it archives the old file rather than deleting it. Nothing about this release destroys the last copy of anything. If the recovery is somehow incomplete, the original is still there under a .bak name for a later attempt.

You do not have to do anything to trigger it. Update, open the app, and the notes are there.

The honest limit

Recovery can only reach data that is still on the device. If you uninstalled Scrib, cleared its app data, or moved to a different phone after the notes vanished, Android deleted the old file at that point and there is nothing left to recover from. Updating over an affected install is the case this fixes, and if you have been leaving a broken Scrib on your phone hoping for a fix, that hope was well placed.

Everything else in 2.2.1

Data safety

Colors: 16 to 40, and every one of them readable

Note colors went from 16 to 40, and accent colors from 5 to 12.

The interesting part is not the count. Earlier palettes avoided deep colors, and the reason was a limitation: note text was drawn near-black no matter what was underneath it, so a dark swatch would have produced black text on a dark background. Text and icons on a colored note now pick their own polarity per color, which is what makes the deep half of this palette safe to offer at all.

All 40 colors clear the WCAG AA 4.5:1 contrast bar for primary text, and the closest one measures 4.77:1. Ten of them are dark enough that Scrib draws white text on them. The choice is made by comparing the actual contrast ratios of both options rather than by guessing from a brightness threshold, because a mid-tone gray sits far enough from both black and white to fail in both directions, and only measuring catches that. Three swatches were retuned after measuring: Terracotta, Olive, and Deep Cyan all landed on the wrong side of the line and were adjusted until they cleared it.

The full set, each labeled with its measured contrast ratio against the text Scrib draws on it:

Export

Under the hood

What is not fixed

Two reviewers have described a problem with the cursor and text selection in the editor. That is not fixed in 2.2.1. I have not been able to reproduce it yet, and I would rather say so than let a release note imply otherwise. If you have hit it, the detail that would help most is the phone model and keyboard app.

Common Questions

My notes disappeared after a Scrib update. Are they gone?

Probably not. The failure that caused this left the original notes file completely intact on the device and simply stopped reading it. Updating to Scrib 2.2.1 and opening the app recovers them automatically. The exception is if you uninstalled the app, cleared its data, or switched phones after the notes vanished, because Android removes the file at that point and no app can recover it afterward.

How do I get my notes back?

Update Scrib to 2.2.1 from Google Play and open it. The recovery runs on the first launch with no prompt, no setting, and no button to press. It copies across every note the encrypted store is missing, restores your settings, and archives the old file instead of deleting it. If your notes do not come back, the old file is still on the device under a backup name, so nothing has been lost by trying.

Why did Scrib show a storage error about free space?

That message was wrong. The real cause was an error inside the storage upgrade in version 2.1.0, and the message that surfaced blamed disk space because that was the most likely explanation the code could think of. Free space had nothing to do with it, and clearing space would not have helped. That path no longer exists in 2.2.1.

Will updating Scrib ever delete my notes?

No. Deleting note storage during an upgrade has been removed entirely from the code. When Scrib needs to move data into a new format it copies it forward and archives the original file under a backup name rather than removing it. The only remaining code that erases storage is the recovery option you trigger yourself, deliberately, from settings.

How many note colors does Scrib have now?

40 note colors and 12 accent colors, up from 16 and 5. All 40 meet the WCAG AA contrast standard of 4.5:1 for primary text, with the closest at 4.77:1, and this is enforced by a test rather than checked by eye. Text and icons drawn on a note pick light or dark per color, which is why the palette can now include genuinely dark shades like Navy, Forest, and Plum.

Does Scrib send anything to a server?

No. Scrib has no accounts, no sync, no analytics, and no crash reporting that identifies you. Notes are encrypted with AES-256 and stay on your device. One consequence worth naming: because there is no telemetry, there was no way to detect the upgrade failure automatically, and no way to confirm the fix except a person choosing to write a review.

Keep Reading

Scrib 2.2.1 for Android

Free, AES-256 encrypted notes with PIN lock and a Private Vault, fully offline. No account, no tracking, and updates that cannot delete your notes.

Get it on Google Play
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