Omit Redact beta: what actually shipped

Omit Redact is out in beta for Windows. This is the release note, written the way we would want to read one: what shipped, what the numbers are, and what is still wrong with it.

The build is v1.0.0-beta.2, for Windows 10 and 11 on x64. There is no macOS build and no Linux build. Omit Redact is the only app we ship today, and nothing here should be read as saying otherwise.

Start with the part you will hit first. We have not bought a code signing certificate yet, which means Windows SmartScreen will show a warning the first time you run the installer, and it will show it to every single person who downloads this build rather than only to you.

The warning is about the missing certificate. It is not a judgement about the file you downloaded, and it is not Windows detecting something inside it. But you should not simply take our word for that, because "ignore the security warning" is what every bad installer on the internet also says. So do the check that actually tests the claim: click through if you have decided to trust us, then disconnect the machine from the network and redact a file end to end. Detection, policy, output, all of it. If any part of Omit needed to phone home, that is where it would fail, and it does not. That takes two minutes and it proves the thing we are really asking you to believe. A certificate is on the way, and until it lands the download page says all of this too, with the exact screen and which button to press.

There are two installers. Both give you the same application and the same full Fast detection tier, and what differs is which models travel in the box.

On what costs money: Protect, the clipboard guard, is free for everyone with no licence and no expiry, and it does not stop working when the trial does. Everything paid, which means file redaction, re-identifying from the vault, and the Accuracy tier, runs on a 15 day trial. When it ends the app keeps opening and Protect keeps running, and the paid surfaces lock one at a time instead of the whole application refusing to start. We changed this during the beta because the first version put the gate too early, and an expired trial made the product look broken instead of expired.

The trial itself is a local stamp in the app data directory, resolved offline like everything else. It only ever moves forward, a corrupted stamp is not treated as a fresh install, and if the stamp cannot be written at all then nothing is granted, not everything. Deleting that file starts a new trial, and instead of pretending otherwise, the docs say so.

Entitlement is checked in the engine, not in the interface. Hiding a button is not a control, and the RPC surface underneath is reachable, so the check has to live where the work actually happens. In this build it also re-checks per parameter: asking for a reversible redaction resolves the vault entitlement before the vault is constructed, and asking for the Accuracy tier without an entitlement quietly downgrades to Fast instead of returning an error.

One packaging change deserves its own paragraph. Two separate defects in earlier builds shipped installers whose Python engine never started, and both times the symptom on screen looked like the app waiting for a licence, which is about the least helpful way a failure like that could present. The build now installs the real thing, spawns the installed engine, and makes it answer a redaction request. A PERSON detection coming back in the result is what proves the spaCy model loaded, not that a file of roughly the right size exists in roughly the right folder. We were testing the second thing and believing we had tested the first.

The fixes in this beta: PDF redaction no longer refuses a document whose colorspace has been renamed in a way that collides, and it now dissolves the collision and redacts the page instead. Separately, an inline image survives the page rewrite instead of being dropped when pdfium rebuilds it. Settings names the build and the channel you are running, which sounds trivial until you are reading a bug report that says "the latest version". There is an update check, and it is off by default: no timer, no network call at launch, nothing in the way when you open the app. It runs when you ask it to and not otherwise, which felt like the only version of an update check consistent with the rest of the product. The uninstaller now asks twice before it removes your vault, with the model files pre-checked because you can always download them again, and the vault box never pre-checked and labelled plainly that documents redacted against it can never be restored. Silent and passive uninstalls delete nothing at all. We also fixed four apps that were reporting a version number no release ever had, so every manifest and crate now agrees with one file.

What is not in this build: there is no macOS build and no Linux build, and there is no centralized management console. The other apps are not shipped. We are not SOC 2 or HIPAA certified and we do not have a report to send your procurement team. The offline architecture makes some controls inherent instead of attested, which is a different claim and not automatically a better one for your reviewer, so ask them which they need before you spend time on a trial. The Trust Center sets out which is which.

Bug reports go to the issues tracker on the releases repository, and the release notes for this tag list the assets by their exact filenames. Please include the version string from Settings, which is why it is there now. If something in these notes turns out to be wrong, tell us and we will correct the post instead of editing around it.