Why Prevon will never live in a browser

Building Prevon as a website instead of a native app would have been the easier path in almost every way — one codebase, instant updates, no app store review. It was also never seriously on the table, for reasons that go directly to the promises this whole architecture is built to keep.

Code that re-downloads itself every time you open it

A website is not a fixed, verifiable piece of software — it re-fetches its own code from a server essentially every time you load the page. That means a website's security depends on trusting a server and a DNS provider to keep serving the exact same, unmodified code forever. If either is compromised for even a few minutes, different code — including malicious code — can be served without any visible warning to the user. A native app, by contrast, is a signed, sealed package. It cannot silently change between the moment you installed it and the moment you open it.

The browser itself is not a neutral container

Browser extensions can read content on the page, including what you type into it — a capability most people never think about, and one that a genuinely private app cannot afford to be exposed to. Browsers also treat locally stored data as disposable: they will clear it under storage pressure to make room for something else, because from the browser's point of view, a website's local data was never meant to be permanent. A native app writes directly and permanently to your device's storage, and it stays there until you decide otherwise — not until the browser decides it needs the space.

Convenience and sovereignty are not always the same thing. Every time they conflicted, we picked sovereignty.

None of this means browsers are bad technology. It means a browser is optimized for a completely different set of guarantees than the ones a zero-knowledge vault has to make — and a company that says "trust our encryption" while shipping it as a website that re-downloads its own code on every visit is asking you to trust two very different things at once.