Introducing Hidewell Vault

Hidewell Vault is an encrypted vault for your photos, videos and documents, on iPhone and Android. You open it by drawing a pattern. That pattern only works on your phone.

It’s available now on Google Play and coming soon to the App Store. Here is what it is, who it’s for, and how it works.

The problem with pattern vaults

Patterns are easy to remember, which also makes them easy to guess. If a vault’s key comes from the pattern alone, anyone with a copy of your phone’s storage, or your cloud backup, can try every pattern on a fast computer.

Hidewell keeps the pattern and removes that shortcut. Every guess has to run through your phone’s own security chip, one at a time. Backups use a separate 12-word recovery phrase, so the cloud copy never depends on your pattern.

Who it’s for

Hidewell is for anyone with photos, videos or documents they want to keep to themselves. We wrote down who we protect you from:

A casual snooper with your unlocked phone for a few minutes.
A thief with your locked phone.
A forensic examiner with a full copy of your phone’s storage.
Someone pressuring you to open the app.
Someone who gets into your cloud account and finds your backup.
Us. We have no key, no readable copy, and no analytics.

We’re just as clear about the limits. No app can protect you from malware or a phone controlled by someone else, from someone watching you draw your pattern, or from a phone that’s unlocked with the vault already open. The full threat model is on our home page.

How it works

Setup takes about a minute.

Draw a strong pattern. At least 6 dots and 2 turns on a 5×5 grid. A strength meter rejects common shapes like letters, borders and spirals.
Write down 12 words. Your recovery phrase is shown once. It’s the only way to restore your backup on a new phone.
Move files in. Import from your photos, Files or the share sheet. Hidewell then helps you delete the originals and empty Recently Deleted.

Behind the scenes, your files are encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a random master key. Your pattern unlocks that key on your phone, through the Secure Enclave on iPhone or StrongBox on Android, then Argon2id. Your recovery phrase unlocks it when you restore a backup. Neither is stored anywhere. The security design has the details.

What you get

Pattern vaults. Each pattern opens its own vault. There is no vault list on screen or on disk.
Duress pattern. Opens a believable decoy and quietly destroys access to your other vaults on that phone.
Phrase-keyed backup. Encrypted on your phone, stored in your own iCloud Drive or Google Drive.
Originals, always. Live Photos, RAW and HEIC kept at full quality.
Video without plaintext copies. Videos play straight from the encrypted vault, decrypted a piece at a time, with no decrypted copy written out.
Secure camera. Photos and video are encrypted as you shoot, straight into the vault. Nothing touches your camera roll.
Albums and tags. Sorted your way, inside the encrypted index.
Lock hygiene. Locks when you leave, blurs the app switcher, detects screen recording, and auto-locks on a timer.
Alternate icons. A plain icon so the app doesn’t stand out on your home screen.

Nothing to report

Hidewell has no account and no sign-up. It has no ads and no analytics. The app never connects to our servers, and there is no setting that turns that on. The only network activity is your phone’s app store handling an upgrade to Pro and, if you turn it on, your encrypted backup going to your own cloud drive.

The cryptography core is open source, and it’s where all the security happens; the apps are a thin native layer on top. Its line-by-line security review is published, with every finding and how it was fixed, so you can read exactly how your keys are made. We’re an EU company, made in the EU, under GDPR.

There is one trade-off, and we’d rather say it plainly. If you lose both your pattern and your recovery phrase, your files are gone. Nobody can recover them, including us. That is what makes it private.

Same encryption on every plan

Free is not a weaker vault. It includes one vault with up to 150 photos and 15 videos, encrypted backup, lock hygiene and alternate icons. Pro adds unlimited vaults and files, the duress pattern, the secure camera, and albums and tags. See pricing.

Available on Android

Hidewell Vault is available now on Android from Google Play. The iPhone app is coming soon to the App Store. It’s free to start, with no sign-up and no email. Your first vault takes about a minute.

Keep it to yourself. Get Hidewell Vault.