News & Updates

2024: A Year in Review for Filen

Filen Blog

Jan 22, 2025 • 12 min read

As 2024 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on what has been a productive and transformative year for Filen. Our journey this year has been guided by a simple goal: to continuously improve and expand our services while staying true to our core values of privacy, security, and user empowerment. Here's an overview of the key developments from this year.

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

January

A fresh start to the year!

The new year began with a renewed commitment to transparency and development. On January 12th, we shared a status update, reflecting on the success of Black Friday 2023 and our ongoing infrastructure improvements. We also laid out our plans for the future, giving you a glimpse into the exciting updates we were preparing for 2024. This strong start set the tone for everything we aimed to achieve this year.

The first months of the year were primarily dedicated to planning and working on our new servers. Following Black Friday 2023, we allocated the majority of our generated resources to transitioning Filen entirely to our own servers. Since the end of 2023, 100% of Filen’s services have been running on servers fully owned by Filen.

This significant investment required substantial time and effort, as we managed the entire project ourselves—from the initial planning phase and creating blueprints to configuring spaces, installation, and data migration.

To gain measurable insights into the performance of our new servers, products, and overall services, we launched a survey shortly before Black Friday 2023. The results of this survey were shared with you in January and served as a baseline for comparison with all subsequent surveys conducted throughout the year.

February

Quiet Preparation

February was a quieter month for announcements, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t busy. Behind the scenes, we worked tirelessly on setting up and enhancing our new infrastructure. At the same time, we worked on the latest mobile update and addressed numerous minor bugs across various products.

March

Mobile Gets Smarter

In March, we introduced mobile app version 2.0.72, packed with features to make your experience even better. We added automatic camera upload improvements, giving you the ability to retain internal albums, and introduced background fetch for a smoother experience. File provider integration was also rolled out, making it easier than ever to access your files from anywhere. Your feedback on these updates has been invaluable and inspires us to keep improving.

Meanwhile, we gradually brought the server investment project to a close toward the end of the month, allowing us to shift our focus to the development of upcoming features.

April

Building Momentum

While April didn’t bring any major public announcements, it was a month of focus and development. We stayed dedicated to enhancing the platform and ensuring that what we deliver is reliable, secure, and user-friendly.

May

Sharing Milestones

On May 23rd, we released a detailed status update, giving you a transparent look at what we’ve been working on. From our progress on the SDK and CLI tool to internal personnel changes, we opened up about what’s happening behind the scenes. We also shared news about our planned certification and audit processes, ensuring we uphold the highest standards of security and compliance.

Short commend: Our perspective on the audit process has remained consistent to this day. We believe that an audit should be utilized as effectively as possible. Conducting one only to make significant changes to the product afterward, thereby nullifying the audit’s value, doesn’t make finacial sense to us. The current plan is to complete our latest 2025 investment project and the mobile rework before transitioning into the audit process.

The new CLI and SDK entered their first beta phase at the end of the month. Experienced users were able to use the initial versions by visiting our GitHub and test them with non-critical data.

A few weeks earlier, we had the pleasure of welcoming a new developer to the Filen team. The CLI project marked their first contribution as part of Team Filen.

June

Steady Progress

June was a month of steady progress. We placed a strong focus on the development of all new updates this month. In particular, the development of the new desktop client gained significant momentum during this period. At the same time, the next financial planning phase began for the first reinvestment in our server infrastructure.

July

Listening to You

In July, we turned to you, our community, to help shape the future of Filen. We launched a user satisfaction survey, giving you the opportunity to share your feedback and ideas. We were thrilled with the response and used your insights to guide our decisions moving forward. To thank you, we included a giveaway that added some excitement to the feedback process. We compared the data with the results of the last survey from 2023 to make strategic decisions regarding all upcoming innovations.

The month was also marked by the intensive development of the upcoming November releases. Although we hadn’t shared any details with you at the time, we already knew that we wanted to launch all the new products simultaneously on Black Friday. As a result, we were working with a tight schedule.

August

Planning Big Things

In our August 26th status update, we shared most of the exciting things we had in store. From the financial investments and infrastructure upgrades to the development of a new desktop client, we were gearing up for a strong end to the year. We also teased the upcoming Black Friday sale, which we knew would be one of our best yet.

Together with the status update, we also announced the first major File Q&A session. In a dedicated portal, you had approximately 30 days to submit all the questions that were on your mind.

While we continued working in the background on new features such as WebDAV support, network drive functionality, and S3 integration.

September

Behind the Scenes

In September, the time had finally come—our new products entered the beta phase. Together with our beta team, we worked diligently to refine everything as much as possible. During this process, we realized the potential to make this phase even more effective by expanding the scope of our beta program.

October

Preparing for Big Changes

In October, we continued our behind-the-scenes efforts to prepare for the major updates and announcements that would come in the final months of the year. While there weren’t public updates, we were hard at work for you.

The final project we aimed to complete for the major release was the website. Although we launched a new website for Black Friday 2023, we were no longer entirely satisfied with the changes. We envisioned a more modern style that we felt better represented us, along with a fresh color scheme to establish a new visual identity for the future.

A key focus for us was the blog. We wanted to bring the blog more into the spotlight, as it offers the most straightforward way to share announcements, provide technical insights, or gather feedback. To achieve this, we decided to give the blog a prominent position on our website and homepage.

At the same time, we began working on a new Blog design and a relocation of our roadmap to integrate these changes seamlessly.

November

A Month of Big News

Fianlly we approached our goal as November was the standout month for us. We published the announced Q&A session, answering your questions about upcoming features, security measures, and our vision for the future.

Then came Black Friday 2024, starting on November 18th. With discounts of up to 50%, we thanked our loyal users and welcomed new ones to the Filen family.

But the real highlight was the launch of our biggest update ever. This included a our new completly reworked desktop client, a new Web-App update, the completly new Website, a CLI tool, developer documentation, and an SDK, marking a major leap forward for the platform.

Like in the years before, many users anticipated our Lifetime Plan sale, which we conducted with a limited quantity and attractiv discounts. As it was to be expected, we were completly sold our by end of november.

After the release of all the changes, we entered a phase of listening. While we had carefully tested all our products, we understood that only a large influx of users would truly put every function through its paces. As a result, we spent considerable time monitoring all our social media channels to gather reports of bugs, inconsistencies, and suggestions for improvement.

During this time, we also introduced the new features.filen.io page. Based on feedback from previous surveys and our general shift in communication structure, we realized that having a dedicated space for feature suggestions, separate from GitHub, would be a valuable addition.

Home | Filen Docs

Filen Docs

December

Finishing Strong

We ended the year on a high note. After the official closure of the black friday sale, we shared our final status update, recapping Black Friday’s success and introducing the new beta testing program. We also participated in the Heise IT-Security Day, where we proudly shared our expertise on client-side encryption and seamless security.

To top it all off, we started planning and investing in our server infrastructure, boosting speed, reliability, and security for all users. It was the perfect way to close out a great year.

Looking Ahead

2024 has been an incredible year for Filen.io, and we couldn’t have achieved it without you. Your feedback, support, and trust are the driving forces behind everything we do. We’re excited to carry this momentum into 2025, with even more features, improvements, and innovations on the horizon.

The first few months of 2025 will focus on investment projects related to our infrastructure, followed by the next major mobile update/rework and a marketing campaign. Later in the year, we plan to introduce Filen Spaces and other business and family options.

Thank you for being part of our journey. Here’s to another amazing year together! 💙

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Looking Ahead