Hello dear community,

Hope you're all doing well. Over here our team keeps showing up, and generating great news, despite all the challenges. Today I want to share some updates we're especially proud of: a set of improvements to the Tella Web connection that makes it significantly more reliable when internet is not readily available

Why this matters

Tella is designed centering the needs of people working in challenging environments: journalists documenting sensitive investigations, human rights defenders collecting evidence in conflict zones, activists monitoring elections in remote areas, people who face surveillance and repression because of their identities, work or ideas. Many of them (and many of you!!) do this work in places where the internet is slow, unstable, or intentionally disrupted. And when you're trying to send a report from the field, the last thing you need is to wonder whether it actually went through.

So we've been working on making the Tella Web connection more resilient!

  • Background submission is now more reliable. When background submission is enabled, uploads complete even if you switch to another app or close Tella entirely.
  • Automatic retry when connectivity is restored. If your submission is interrupted by a weak or dropped connection, Tella now queues the report and automatically retries the moment your phone has internet again.

We also fixed a few bugs that were preventing reports from being sent correctly in some cases, and did extensive testing simulating adverse network conditions. You can see the full details in the changelog.

But wait... what's Tella Web again?

Tella Web is an open-source, self-hostable, server tool, developed by our team at Horizontal, that lets organizations centrally receive and manage reports submitted from Tella. We often think of it as an inbox for your team's reports: photos, videos, audio recordings, and text, sent directly from the Tella app on users' phones. Organizations can organize the data collection process by using projects, manage user roles, and even push resources (guides, instructions) directly to users' connected devices.

Tella Web has three advanced features worth knowing about:

  • Auto-report every time you capture media in Tella, it's automatically uploaded to the connected Tella Web server. This feature is commonly used in situations where you need evidence off your device fast: protests, raids, anywhere device confiscation is a real risk, and users cannot take the time to create reports manually.
  • Auto-delete works alongside auto-report: once a file is successfully uploaded, it's automatically deleted from your device, minimizing the sensitive data stored locally.
  • Background submission lets uploads continue even when you close the app. Combined with the new automatic retry, users can collect evidence, hit send, and resting assure that Tella manage submission.

These features are particularly useful in low-connectivity areas, during protests or raids, or anywhere internet disruptions are a possibility.

Tella Web isn't the only connection option. Depending on your needs, Tella also connects to Uwazi, Open Data Kit, Google Drive, Nextcloud, and Dropbox.

Want to try Tella Web?

If you'd like to test it before self-hosting, we can give you access to our demo server. And if you have questions about whether Tella Web (or any other connection) makes sense for your organization, just answer this email or write to us. We are happy to help 😄.

We also want to give a shout out to our friends from Escuela Común who created a recipe to install Tella Web's servers easily on CoopCloud: https://recipes.coopcloud.tech/tellaweb


Enough about Tella Web 🫠

Our new releases also bring translation updates and bug fixes. We're glad to welcome Mizo as a new supported language, thanks to the Tella localization sprint we hosted with our friends at the The Bachchao Project. Currently Tella Android and iOS are available in 24 languages (!!).

And two things coming soon: a new release of Tella FOSS (our 100% open-source version, on F-Droid) is nearly ready. And we're applying the final recommendations from the security audit on Nearby Sharing, our upcoming offline, encrypted, cross-platform file transfer feature. I can't wait to share more.

Stay safe,

Caro from the Tella team