Open Granola startup idea surfaces
After Granola locked down its local macOS database, an ex‑Intel CTO pitched 'Open Granola'—an open, agent‑readable markdown notes API to preserve local‑first workflows and interoperability. The thread is gaining traction as a reaction to closed local databases and speaks to developer demand for open agent‑friendly formats. (x.com)
A public "open-granola" repo (cardotrejos) proposes an open, local‑first notes implementation that stores meetings as agent‑readable Markdown with a simple API and prototypes for audio capture and specs. (github.com) Multiple community projects depended on Granola’s on‑disk cache files (historically cache‑v3.json) and reported breakage after Granola’s cache format shifted to cache‑v4.json, prompting bug reports and compatibility fixes. (github.com) Several tooling projects explicitly read Granola’s local files and credentials—examples include a Granola exporter that reads supabase.json, Raycast extensions that require access to ~/Library/Application Support/Granola, and Python MCP servers that index the cache for local search. (github.com) Third‑party reverse‑engineering notes and scripts describe Granola’s local storage as an encrypted SQLite/OPFS backing in later versions, which makes programmatic extraction and filesystem inspection more complex than earlier plain JSON caches. (github.com) The ecosystem response includes packaged tooling and releases: a granola‑mcp‑server was published on PyPI this month to bridge local caches with MCP clients, and community discussion has appeared on Hacker News and GitHub threads. (pypi.org) Authors of the "open‑granola" proposal and several forks explicitly frame their work as preserving local‑first workflows by emitting Markdown and a clear API that third‑party agents and PKM tools can consume without parsing proprietary or opaque cache formats. (github.com)
