If what you need is not here, the form at the bottom reaches a person.
A space is a private area holding its own photographs, documents and notes, opened by its own passcode. Everything inside it is encrypted with a key worked out from that passcode at the moment you type it.
You can have up to twenty-four. What is in one space cannot be seen, searched or reached from any other.
You cannot, and neither can we. This is the one question with no good answer, so it is worth being blunt about it.
Your passcode is not stored on a server, and it is not stored on your phone either. It is only ever typed. The app derives a key from it, uses that key, and forgets it. That is exactly what makes a space private, and it is exactly why a forgotten passcode is permanent.
There is no reset, no recovery code, no security question and no support procedure. If somebody ever offers to recover a Vessum passcode for you, they are lying to you.
No, and no app on iOS can. An app cannot show or hide other apps, cannot register a second device passcode, cannot replace the Home Screen and cannot remove anything from Search, the App Library or Settings. Those are system powers with no way for an app to request them.
Anything on the App Store claiming to do it either is not doing it, or needs a jailbreak, which makes your phone less secure rather than more. What Vessum protects is what you move into Vessum.
Two is enough for most people. Three if you are preparing for more than one kind of situation.
The second one matters more than people expect. A space that opens onto nothing is a signal in itself, and tells whoever opened it to keep asking. Put enough in it that it looks like somewhere a real person keeps things.
No, and this is the part the app is built around.
Every space is the same app. Same settings screen, same sections in the same order, same wording, same ability to create and remove spaces of its own, same error messages. There is no badge marking one of them as the original and no feature that only the original has.
A space lists the spaces it created and never the space it came from, because nothing pointing upwards is written down anywhere. So somebody who opens a space cannot tell whether they are at the first one you made or three levels beneath it.
Not from what is on the disk. The app writes twenty-four slots of exactly the same size on the first launch and keeps them all full from that moment on. A slot holding a space and a slot holding nothing are both the same number of bytes of high-entropy data, and there is no index, no count and no flag anywhere.
The home page has a live demonstration of this that runs the real cryptography in your browser, if you would like to try to tell them apart yourself.
What is not hidden is that Vessum is installed at all. That part cannot be concealed and we will not pretend otherwise.
No. Deliberately, and this cuts both ways.
Vessum has no server and no sync, and the store is excluded from iCloud and from computer backups so it cannot be lifted off a machine that backed your phone up. That means nobody can take it from a cloud account.
It also means that if you lose the phone, everything in it is gone. Treat Vessum as the only copy, and keep anything you genuinely cannot lose somewhere else as well.
The app discards the key rather than the file, which is stronger than deleting.
Flash storage does not honestly overwrite anything, so scrubbing the bytes would be theatre. A file whose key no longer exists is permanently unreadable instead, and the number of files on the disk never drops in a way that would show something was removed.
Vessum is built for somebody holding your phone and demanding a passcode. It is not built against a laboratory with the right equipment and unlimited time.
If that is what you are preparing for, the honest advice has nothing to do with this app: do not carry the data. Sign out of and remove what you do not want examined, and restore it afterwards. Power the phone fully off before the checkpoint, since a phone that has not been unlocked since boot is in a much stronger state than one that has.
Laws on disclosing passcodes differ sharply between countries, and in some places refusing, or presenting a prepared space, carries consequences of its own. Nothing here is legal advice. Know the rules where you are.
Nothing. There is no account, no email address, no analytics, no crash reporting and no advertising identifier. The app makes no outbound network connection, because it contains no code that could.
We could not identify a single user of this app if we were asked to, and we would have nothing to hand over if we were compelled to.
Pay once. No subscription, no in-app purchases and no ads. Apple sets the exact price in your country, which is why the figure is on the App Store rather than here.
An iPhone or iPad running iOS 17 or later. It works completely offline and never needs a connection, before or after you install it.
Please do not send us anything confidential. This form is ordinary email and is not encrypted. Do not include passcodes, and never send us a passcode even if you are asked to by someone claiming to be us. We will never ask for one, and it would be useless to us anyway.