Mid-October, we started our donation campaign by explaining why we need donations. We then described the achievements of 2018 made possible by your donations. Today, we're unveiling our plans for 2019. If you like them, please take the time to donate.

So far this year many more people have been donating (+61%) but we have raised less money overall (-51%) because we are missing bigger donations, especially in bitcoins.

Having many more donors this year is an excellent sign that Tails is important for more people and that we are doing a good job at helping them.

We are extremely grateful to all of you who not only want to improve your safety online, but also understand that we need your help to sustain Tails. Being backed by a large number of people making smaller but steadily donations is the best we can dream of. So, thank you!

New features

We will focus on improving installation and upgrade, as we know that they still cause major difficulties for new users:

In January, we will release a brand new installation mechanism to finally make it easy to install Tails on macOS (and also easier on Windows and Linux).

We will add support for Secure Boot .

We will remove the need for manual upgrades and make it possible to always do automatic upgrades (except for major upgrades, like Tails 3.0 to 4.0). We will also research lighter and more robust upgrade mechanisms.

Adoption

We will redesign our homepage to explain better what is Tails to new users and why they should use it.

We will make it much easier to translate our website and train new translators, hopefully leading to offering more languages available on our website.

Under the hood

We will upgrade Tails to Debian 10 (Buster), planned for mid 2019.

As always, most of the day-to-day work that we do is invisible to our users and we will tackle many technical migrations in our code and infrastructure (Debian 10, Tor Launcher as Web Extension, Jenkins 2, Gitolite 3, Java 11, etc.).

We will contribute the security improvements that we wrote for the Thunderbird autoconfiguration with Thunderbird upstream.

Thanks to your generous donations, we will finally have a budget dedicated to do many more smaller usability improvements everywhere in Tails.

In 2019, we will put a lot of efforts on making Tails easier to understand and install. More and more people will get to know and use Tails to protect themselves. We all want this, and you, by donating at your level, can help to make this happen.