Vaulta

Your private vault for photos, videos, and memories, secured and organized across your Apple devices.

Comment

Inspiration

Vaulta started from a very ordinary privacy problem: handing someone your phone should not mean handing them access to every personal photo, video, or sensitive document you keep. The built-in Hidden album is useful, but it is still recognizable, easy to find, and tied to the same device unlock context that someone may already have.

I wanted Vaulta to feel like a serious privacy layer rather than another gallery app. The goal was to give people a dedicated place for private media with protections that hold up in real social situations: someone swiping too far in Photos, borrowing your phone, asking you to unlock something, or opening an app that clearly advertises itself as a vault.

What It Does

Vaulta is a private media vault for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Users can import photos, videos, and sensitive files into organized folders, browse them in a polished media viewer, favorite or hide individual items, and keep private content separated from the normal camera roll experience.

The premium privacy layer, powered by RevenueCat, unlocks advanced protections:

  • PIN and biometric protection for the real vault.
  • A decoy vault that opens with a different PIN and shows safe content while keeping the real vault hidden.
  • Disguise Mode, which turns Vaulta into a real playable space game so the app can be hidden in plain sight.
  • Face-down relock for quickly moving away from the vault in sensitive moments.
  • iCloud-backed sync for eligible premium users.
  • Premium editing/export capabilities and privacy-focused file handling.

Vaulta is not just a locked folder. It is an app designed around the moments when privacy actually gets tested.

How I Built It

Vaulta is built as a modern SwiftUI app targeting iOS 26 and Apple platforms, with SwiftData for local data modeling and an architecture split by product features. The vault experience is organized around folders, sortable media grids, full-screen photo/video viewing, encrypted media storage, temporary file cleanup, and careful lock-state routing.

RevenueCat is integrated as the purchase backend for premium access. The app resolves entitlements at launch, maps premium status into feature access, and uses that access policy across onboarding, settings, privacy controls, iCloud sync eligibility, and premium upsells. I also kept a backend selection layer so purchase behavior can be tested and switched cleanly while preserving the rest of the app flow.

One of the most fun parts was building Disguise Mode. When enabled, Vaulta opens as a functional arcade-style space game. The vault stays hidden until the user performs the private unlock route, after which the app transitions into the real folder interface. That required coordinating SwiftUI app routing, premium entitlement checks, app lock state, orientation behavior, and game UI so the disguise feels credible instead of cosmetic.

Challenges

The hardest design challenge was balancing privacy with usability. Security features that are too aggressive can frustrate users, but privacy features that are too passive do not help in the real world. Vaulta needed predictable unlock behavior, fast relocking, clean premium gates, and file cleanup that protects sensitive media without interrupting normal browsing, sharing, editing, or video playback.

The technical challenge was making all of those systems work together: SwiftData storage, optional CloudKit-backed metadata sync, encrypted media handling, temporary video preparation, RevenueCat entitlements, onboarding personalization, and the disguise-game route. A privacy app has many edge cases because every app lifecycle event matters: launch, backgrounding, foregrounding, system sheets, purchases, restores, share imports, media playback, and device orientation.

What I Learned

I learned that monetization can be part of product design instead of something bolted on at the end. RevenueCat gave Vaulta a clean way to turn advanced protections into a premium product surface while keeping the free tier useful. That made it easier to design feature access around real value: basic vault organization for trying the app, then premium for the protections people need when privacy is high-stakes.

I also learned that a privacy product has to communicate clearly. Users need to understand exactly what a decoy vault does, what Disguise Mode hides, when content is synced, and which protections are active. The best privacy interface is not the one with the most settings; it is the one where users can quickly tell what is protected and what will happen next.

What's Next

Next I want to tighten the launch funnel, record more polished onboarding and demo footage, expand break-in reporting, improve cross-device sync reliability, and run pricing tests through RevenueCat. I also want to keep refining the app's design so Vaulta feels trustworthy, calm, and fast every time someone opens it.

Short Description

Vaulta is a private media vault for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that protects photos, videos, and sensitive files with PIN/biometric lock, decoy vaults, face-down relock, iCloud sync, and a hidden-in-plain-sight game disguise powered by RevenueCat premium unlocks.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history