[[!meta title="Our achievements in 2019"]]

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[[!tag announce]]

On October 7, we started our [[yearly donation campaign|news/2019-fundraiser]]. Today, we summarize what we achieved with your help in 2019.

If you liked our work in 2019, please take a minute to donate and make Tails thrive in 2020!

Easier adoption by new users

In 2019, we focused on fewer but critical features to make Tails easier to discover and adopt for first time users.

In January, we completely changed the Tails installation procedure. Tails is now downloaded as a *USB image*: an exact copy of the data as it is written to the USB stick.

This made the installation experience better for all operating
systems and particularly easier and much faster for less
tech-savvy users of Windows and
macOS.

Then, we improved our documentation to help first time users with their Tails installation:

We explained better how to troubleshoot failing Wi-Fi, an issue unfortunately quite common, especially on Mac, and documented which Wi-Fi USB adapters work well in Tails.

We created a [[boot menu animation|install/windows#animation]] to visualize how to start Tails on PC and clarified related troubleshooting instructions.

As a consequence, more people than ever are using Tails:

- Tails is used nearly 25 000 times every day worldwide. That's 15% more than in August 2018.

The percentage of people using Tails on Mac more than doubled since January 2019.

2019 was also a year of heavy maintenance work, as always. Keeping alive a tool like Tails consists mostly of many tasks that are not very exciting: publishing new releases every 6 weeks, updating Tails and our infrastructure to new versions of Debian and other software that we use, fixing small issues as they are reported to us, and implementing the many small improvements that make Tails easier to use.

In October, we released [[Tails 4.0|version_4.0]], which is the first version of Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster).

Tails 4.0 was our most important release in years. Tails 4.0 adds
KeePassXC, OnionShare 1.3.2, fixes Electrum, updates to Debian 10 and
GNOME 3.30, starts faster and uses less memory.

We released 13 new versions of Tails to deliver improvements and security fixes as soon as possible.

We published more emergency releases than ever before: 5 emergency releases to fix 5 critical security vulnerabilities in Firefox and Tor Browser and always keep Tails as secure as possible.