Decoy Vault: Photo & Note Safe

About Decoy Vault: Photo & Note Safe

Decoy Vault is a private, password-protected vault for your photos, albums, contacts and notes — disguised as a game you can actually play.

To anyone who picks up your phone, Decoy Vault looks and plays like an ordinary game (Minesweeper by default; Sudoku and Chess also included). Only you know the secret way in: a simple long-press on the game's title opens a passphrase screen, and your real passphrase unlocks your private vault. This disguise is the whole point, and we're upfront about it — it protects you from a snoop or a casual glance, not from honest review by Apple or Google.

Strong, real encryption (not "hide by hiding")
• Everything is encrypted with modern, authenticated encryption (Argon2id + XChaCha20-Poly1305 over an encrypted SQLCipher database).
• Your master passphrase derives the keys; the keys never leave your phone — no account, no cloud servers, no vendor backdoor.
• Optional Face ID / Touch ID / fingerprint for fast unlock, backed by your device's secure hardware.

What you can keep private
• Photos & Albums — import with the system photo picker (no broad photo-library permission). Location/EXIF metadata is stripped on import. A secure full-screen viewer with zoom; nothing is written back to your camera roll.
• Notes — rich-text notes, checklists and attachments, encrypted and searchable.
• Contacts — a fully private, in-app encrypted address book; import only the contacts you choose, with no write-back to your phone.
• In-app camera capture that encrypts immediately.

Privacy by design
• Local-first and offline — your vault content is never collected or transmitted by us.
• Screenshot/recents protection for vault screens; encrypted media is excluded from cloud backups.
• No subscription. Decoy Vault is free with a single, unobtrusive banner shown only inside the unlocked vault; a one-time Remove Ads purchase clears it forever.

For the careful: an optional decoy passphrase
• You can set a separate "duress" passphrase that opens a different, decoy vault pre-filled with harmless content of your choosing — useful if you're ever asked to unlock your phone. It's off by default and entirely up to you.

Important — there is no password recovery, and there is no backup. Decoy Vault is zero-knowledge and pure local-only: only your passphrase unlocks it, the vault lives only on this phone, and there is no recovery and no backup. Because only you hold the keys — no reset, no recovery key, no backdoor, not even for us — if you forget your passphrase, your photos, notes and contacts are gone forever, and no one can recover them. And because your vault never leaves this device — no cloud, no sync, no backup, no transfer to a new phone — if you lose, break, reset or replace this device, the vault is gone forever too. That is a deliberate privacy choice: the only way for your data to leak is if it can leave the device, so it never does. At vault creation you must read and tick a warning that confirms you understand both of these: no password recovery, and no backup — lose the device and the data is gone.

Note: the disguise protects against casual inspection and shoulder-surfing. No phone app can defeat a determined forensic examination of your device. Decoy Vault is a personal-privacy tool, not a tool for deceiving authorities, employers, or for any unlawful purpose.