What started it
I wanted somewhere to put photos I would rather not explain when someone borrows my phone. The obvious answer was one of the vault apps already on the App Store, so I installed a few.
Every one of them asked for an email address before it would hide anything. That is the part that stopped me. To keep something private from the people around me, I first had to hand my identity to a company I had never heard of, whose servers I could not see, on terms I had not read.
Then I read the privacy labels
Apple puts a privacy section on every App Store listing. It is not a review or a rating — it is the developer telling Apple, under their own name, what their app sends home. It is one tap from the Get button.
I had never read one. Not once, in years of installing apps. That is the uncomfortable part of this story, and it is why this page exists rather than a page about how careful I am.
So read them for the app you are about to trust, whichever it is. You do not need my opinion for this — the label is their statement, not mine. An app that collects usage data while selling you privacy is telling you something about itself in its own words.
Hushfold's label says Data Not Collected. Not "we minimise it", not "off by default" — there is no analytics SDK in the app, and a check that runs on every build fails the build if anyone ever imports one.
What that turned into
Three decisions, and each one has a cost that I would rather say out loud than let you discover later.
| The decision | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| No account, ever. No email, no sign-up, no server of ours for anything to sit on. | There is no "forgot password" email, because there is no account to send it to. Lose your master password and your 12-word Recovery Kit and the vault is gone — for everyone, including me. |
| Backup goes to your iCloud, not mine. Encrypted before it leaves the phone. | It uses your iCloud storage, not a plan you buy from me. If you are at your 5 GB limit, that is a real problem and Hushfold cannot solve it for you. |
| Paid once or by subscription, not by your attention. No ads, no data to sell, no free tier funded by something you cannot see. | Money has to come from somewhere, so the free tier has a cap: 150 photos and 15 videos. You will meet it. Viewing, exporting and deleting are never gated — but adding more is. |
Who is behind it
An independent developer in Vietnam. One person, no company, no investors, and no growth team that needs your numbers to hit a target.
Which means you have no particular reason to trust me — and I would rather say that than perform the opposite. A name and a photograph on this page would not make the app collect less.
So the app is built to be checked instead of believed. Three things you can verify without taking my word for anything:
- Read the App Store privacy label. It is Apple's page, not mine.
- Turn on Airplane Mode and use the whole app. Everything works, because nothing needs a server.
- Export your vault to a file, any time, free, and open it somewhere else. An app you can walk away from is an app that has to keep earning it.
The full technical account is on the security page, including the parts we cannot do.
Getting in touch
One person reads support@hushfold.app, and it is the same person who wrote the code. Bug reports, disagreements with anything on this page, and "your comparison of my app is wrong" are all welcome — the last one especially, with a link, and the page gets corrected.