There's a strange problem with building a privacy app as a nobody solo dev: the more trustworthy you make it, the harder it is to be trusted.

Kinship Vault is an offline iOS app for your most important documents, passports, IDs, immigration papers, wills, the stuff that ruins your week if it's lost. Everything's encrypted on your own phone. No account, no server I control, no backdoor. I built it so that even I can't access a single user's documents.

Which is exactly the point, and exactly the problem. When a big company says "your data is safe with us," people believe it on reputation alone. When a one-person operation says "trust me, I literally can't see your stuff," it sounds like the setup to a scam, even though it's the opposite. I can't fall back on a brand. I can only fall back on being honest about how it actually works.

So instead of a pitch, here's the honest version: I think the hardest design call in the whole app is recovery. Because there's no server, if you lose your phone there's no reset password email coming. I built two ways back in, a 24-word passphrase, or splitting your key into pieces held by people you trust, so a few of them together can restore you, but any one of them alone has nothing. Personally I think it's the most elegant part of the app, and I'd love to know if it feels that way to you too, or if there's an angle I haven't considered.

If you keep important documents on your phone or let's be honest, in a drawer, I'd love for you to try it and tell me where it breaks.   
  
App Store Link : [https://apps.apple.com/app/kinship-vault/id6764678332](https://apps.apple.com/app/kinship-vault/id6764678332)   
Website : [https://kinshipvault.app](https://kinshipvault.app)

I care more about being told what's broken than about downloads right now. DMs open.

[Self-Promotion] I built a vault so private I can't see inside it. Turns out that's a hard thing to sell.