f-tree

For your laptop

f-tree on Windows and Ubuntu.

It opens a .ftree exported from the phone and draws it the way the phone does — a generation is a column, ancestors at the left. Everything stays on the machine.

Get the desktop app

Finding the latest build…

Installing on Windows

  1. Windows will refuse to run it

    Not because of anything in the file. Windows trusts installers whose publisher has paid for a code-signing certificate, and f-tree has not — so it arrives as an unrecognised app and Defender stops it. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

    “Windows protected your PC.” Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognised app from starting. — More info → Run anyway

    The publisher will read Unknown. That is the honest state of it: nobody has vouched for this file except the checksum below, which you can check yourself.

  2. Choose where it goes

    The installer offers a folder and installs for your account only, so it never asks for an administrator password. Nothing is written outside that folder and your own app data.

  3. Open it and open your tree

    Export a .ftree from the phone — Settings → Export your tree — get it onto the laptop however you like, and open it with File → Open tree. The app reopens it by itself next time.

Installing on Ubuntu and other Linux

Two ways, and the .deb is the easier one if you are on Ubuntu, Debian or Mint — it puts f-tree in your applications menu like anything else. The .AppImage is one file that runs anywhere and installs nothing.

  1. The .deb — apt, not a double-click

    Double-clicking a .deb opens an archive manager on most desktops now, which is not what you want. Install it from the folder you downloaded it to:

    sudo apt install ./f-tree-desktop_*_amd64.deb

    The leading ./ matters — without it apt goes looking for a package by that name.

  2. The .AppImage — make it executable first

    A downloaded AppImage is not executable, by design. Give it permission and run it:

    chmod +x f-tree-*.AppImage && ./f-tree-*.AppImage

    On Ubuntu 22.04 and newer it may stop with dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2. AppImages need the older FUSE library, which no longer ships by default:

    sudo apt install libfuse2

    Or skip it entirely with ./f-tree-*.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run, which unpacks to a temporary folder instead.

  3. Open your tree

    Export a .ftree from the phone — Settings → Export your tree — and open it with File → Open tree. The app reopens it by itself next time.

Why your computer complains

Nobody has vouched for this file

Windows and macOS trust software whose publisher has bought a code-signing certificate and kept a reputation with it. That costs a few hundred pounds a year and identifies a company. f-tree is a free app with no company behind it, so it has neither, and every operating system it lands on will say so.

The warning is doing its job. Clicking past one is a habit worth keeping rare, so here is what you can check instead of taking my word for it: every file below was built by GitHub Actions from the public source, in the open, and GitHub — not this page — publishes the checksum. If the hash of your download matches, the file is byte-for-byte the one that came out of that build.

What the app can reach. It reads the file you open and writes one small note of which file that was, so it can reopen it next time. There is no account, no server and no telemetry. The window itself is refused the network outright — every http and https request from the page is cancelled by the app, which is why the typefaces are read from disk rather than fetched from Google. The only request the app can make is the update check below, and that is off until you turn it on. Leave it off and the app never touches the network at all.

Checking what you got

Verify the download

On Linux run sha256sum <file>; on Windows, certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256. Compare the result with the matching line below.

Version
the latest desktop release
Released
see the release page

Release notes and every build on GitHub

Staying up to date

Two switches, both off

Under Updates in the menu bar there are two, and neither is on when you install:

Check automatically
Looks once at startup and says nothing unless there is something to say.
Offer me betas
Unfinished builds, as soon as they are published. Asks before it turns on.

Check for updates now always answers, including “you have the newest build”, because a question deserves one. Anything downloaded is checked against the SHA-256 GitHub published for it before you are offered it to run; if the two disagree the file is deleted and nothing is installed. On Windows the installer can be run from the app; on Linux the AppImage is downloaded and shown to you, and you put it where you want it.

One more thing

The desktop app reads a tree today: the chart, the people index, the search and the relation finder. Editing, settings and the updater are being built — follow along here. Building and editing a tree is the phone's job for now, and the Android app does all of it.