I'm the maker of Hideroom, an encrypted vault for photos, videos and important papers on iPhone. It isn't out yet: the website is live, the app is being built, and the screens on the site are design previews. Before designing anything I pulled 3,950 recent App Store reviews of 12 vault apps and read through the 470 one- and two-star ones. I expected the anger to be about hackers or prices. The biggest single complaint was simpler: 28% were from people who'd lost their photos, after an update, a reinstall or a new phone. Another 11% were about backups that quietly stopped or didn't survive a move. So the whole thing is built around not losing anything: backup to your own iCloud is on by default, and the app reads each upload back to check it, plus a test restore each week; a nine-word recovery phrase opens your vault on a new phone, so there are no paid resets; export is free on every plan, so a paywall never holds your photos; everything is encrypted on the phone (AES-256-GCM, a key per file) before it's backed up, and there's no account or server of ours that sees it. The bit I keep going back and forth on: you open it by drawing a pattern, and a pattern on its own is a weak secret, so it's combined with a key kept in the iPhone's Keychain. That keeps unlocking quick, but it means the recovery phrase really matters. So my question for you: would you actually write down nine words when setting up an app like this, or would that lose you at setup? And what would you do instead? I've written up the security design, including what it doesn't protect against: https://hideroom.app/security?ref=reddit-sideproject If you'd like one email when it launches (then the address is deleted): https://hideroom.app/?ref=reddit-sideproject#notify Happy to answer anything, and I'll return the favour on your projects.   submitted by   /u/Imaginary_Sea_8008 [link]   [comments]