A sealed album that does not appear in your camera roll.

What it actually does

When you move a photo into AppVault, three things happen in sequence. The file is encrypted on your device with a fresh AES-256-GCM key. The encrypted blob is written to AppVault’s sandboxed container. The original file is removed from the Photos app — not moved to Recently Deleted, not hidden, but securely overwritten before the unlink.

After import, the photo exists only inside the vault. It is not in your camera roll. It is not in your Hidden album. It is not in iCloud Photos (unless you opted into encrypted backup, which encrypts it again before upload). It is not indexed by Spotlight. It does not show up if someone scrolls through your phone or asks Siri to find pictures from last summer.

What it does not do

AppVault does not pretend to make a photo invisible to a forensic examination. If an attacker has physical access to your device, the encryption you signed up for is exactly what protects the file — strong, current, and standard. There is no "extra" magic, and there is no backdoor in case you forget your pattern. We made the vault to be the boring kind of secure: well-known cipher suite, well-known key derivation, no novel cryptography invented in our office.

AppVault is also not a backup app. iCloud Photos will not recover what you have moved into the vault. If you want that safety net, turn on Encrypted iCloud Backup in settings — files are sealed locally before they leave the device, and Apple sees only ciphertext.

Who tends to use it

Most installs come from one of five places: people about to sell an iPhone, people traveling internationally, professionals who occasionally photograph privileged work (lawyers, journalists, therapists, medical staff), parents of teenagers who share a family device, and anyone who has ever handed their phone to a stranger and remembered, halfway through, what was open in Photos.