QOwnNotes 26.10.4 Plugs an Empty-Password Gap in Encrypted Notes and Lets Deck Cards Change Boards
A quick follow-up that makes locked notes safer and your Nextcloud Deck cards a lot more portable.
Frank AlperstaedtPicture this: you lock a note full of recovery codes, wander off to make coffee, and come back to a note that quietly saved itself with a blank password. Not a great feeling. That exact scenario is what the newest QOwnNotes release sets out to prevent, and it does it without making you re-enter anything extra.
QOwnNotes is the plain-text, Markdown-loving notebook that syncs with your Nextcloud or ownCloud server, and version 26.10.4 arrived on 10 October 2026 as a tight follow-up to the previous build.
Safer encrypted notes
The headline fix concerns encrypted notes. After a long stretch of inactivity, a note could end up written to disk with an empty password, which is the sort of bug you only notice when it is already too late. The app now keeps the password available for as long as the decrypted editor stays open, and if the password ever goes missing, a save leaves your existing file and pending edits untouched instead of overwriting anything. If you rely on note encryption for anything sensitive, this alone justifies the update.
Deck cards on the move
Fans of the Nextcloud Deck integration get a genuinely handy new trick: cards can now be moved to a different board or stack, either through a new "Move..." button or from the card list's context menu. Better still, you can select several cards and relocate them in one go, which turns a tedious reshuffle into a few clicks. The release also arrives alongside QOwnNotes for Android 1.3.0, which brings Deck card browsing and search, a refreshed editor layout, and a confirmation prompt before you trash multiple notes at once.
Stability odds and ends
Two crash scenarios were tackled as well. A remaining crash when switching layouts with global keyboard shortcuts is gone, and the Snap package no longer stumbles at startup under Wayland now that missing keyboard data ships with it. Windows users will mostly benefit from the shortcut fix, while the Wayland and macOS test-suite tweaks are of interest to Linux and developer crowds.
Our verdict
If you keep anything private in encrypted notes, grab this build today; the password safeguard is the kind of quiet protection you hope never to need. Deck users will appreciate the card-moving feature as a bonus, and everyone else can treat it as a low-risk polish release that is worth installing whenever the update prompt appears.
Get it on UpdateStar
About Author
Frank Alperstaedt
Frank simply loves to turn good ideas into software products. Frank Alperstaedt has been in executive decision making positions within the software industry for years, growing successful companies from scratch, both domestically and internationally. He is interested in the strategic development of ideas and the overall business of the companies, with which he is involved. He sees it as his mission to position his products where they belong: ahead of the competition.