TORONTO, Feb. 19 — The two-person developer team behind Obsidian, the local-first note-taking application that has built a substantial user base among researchers, developers, and writers since its 2020 launch, on Thursday released Obsidian 1.9 — the largest single update to the application since the 1.0 milestone in October 2022, with a substantially redesigned synchronization engine, new conflict-resolution UI, and end-to-end encrypted Sync as the default for new vaults.
The release is the work of co-founders Erica Xu and Shida Li, who continue to operate Obsidian without external investment and without a traditional company structure, and reflects what the team described in release notes as “a year and a half of background engineering on the synchronization layer.”
“The synchronization engine in 1.0 was solid for the use case it was designed for — small to medium vaults synced across two or three devices — but the user base has long since outgrown that profile,” said Shida Li in a written response to questions from Consumer Tech Wire. “We have customers with 50,000-note vaults synced across six devices, with non-trivial conflict frequency. The 1.9 engine is the answer to that.”
What changed in the sync engine
The 1.9 sync engine is a substantially redesigned implementation that the team said addresses three long-standing issues in the previous version: latency on initial vault sync (a customer with a large vault could previously wait hours for the initial sync to complete), conflict resolution UI (the previous version surfaced conflicts as separate .conflict files that the user had to manually reconcile), and end-to-end encryption performance (the previous implementation was significantly slower than the unencrypted alternative, leading some users to disable encryption for performance reasons).
The new engine, the team said, uses an updated content-addressable storage model with delta-only transmission for changed files, parallel chunk transfer, and a redesigned encryption layer that the team said delivers performance “indistinguishable from the unencrypted Sync configuration” on consumer-grade internet connections.
The new conflict-resolution UI surfaces conflicts in an inline merge view with side-by-side diffs, replacing the previous .conflict file model.
End-to-end encryption as default
The most-discussed change in the 1.9 announcement is the decision to make end-to-end encryption the default state for new vaults configured for Sync. Existing vaults are unaffected, but new Sync configurations will require the user to opt out of end-to-end encryption rather than opting in.
Obsidian Sync is priced at $4 per month or $40 per year, separate from Obsidian’s free desktop and mobile clients.
User reaction
The release was broadly welcomed by long-running Obsidian users in the application’s forum and community Discord, with the most-cited concern being the migration path for users on the legacy .conflict-file workflow.
“The Obsidian team has built an unusually durable product on an unusually deliberate cadence,” said Yumiko Patel-Wong, a knowledge-management researcher who has written extensively on the local-first note-taking category. “1.9 is the Obsidian-team-best-practice version of a sync release — the engineering work happened in the background for a year and a half, and the release is fully formed when it ships.”
Obsidian remains free for personal use; the optional Sync and Publish services are the company’s two paid offerings.
Asari Whitfield-Asari covers AI tools and developer infrastructure for Consumer Tech Wire.