You have an Android phone and photos on it you don't want auto-synced or casually visible: IDs, medical images, financial paperwork, or just private personal photos. The 'private vault' apps that get recommended online are usually iPhone-only, and the Android options you actually find are cluttered with ads, unclear about their encryption, or want an account and an email address before they'll let you in. You want an app built for Android, not a leftover port, that can state plainly how it protects your files rather than just promising that it does.
What is hard right now
- Every well-reviewed photo vault app I see recommended turns out to be iPhone-only, and the Android options that exist are ad-supported or don't say how they actually encrypt anything.
- My phone's default gallery and Google Photos sync sensitive photos — IDs, medical images, private photos — to the cloud automatically, and I never opted into that for these files.
- A 'private' folder that's just hidden behind a PIN doesn't actually hide anything if someone picks up my unlocked phone and starts scrolling through the gallery.
- I don't want to hand a company my email address or trust a support team with a key that unlocks my own photos.
Scenarios
No good vault app exists for Android — until now
You search for a photo vault app, and the well-reviewed results turn out to be iPhone-only App Store links. The Android apps you actually find bundle ads or attribution SDKs, or their marketing never explains how the encryption actually works.
Weave Vault is built for Android, not ported over as an afterthought, and is available on both iOS 16+ and Android. It states its cryptography in plain terms: every file is sealed with AES-256-GCM, and the key that unlocks it is derived with Argon2id, using a 64 MiB memory cost and a 128-bit salt — not glossed over as unspecified 'military-grade encryption.'
You download the app straight from Google Play. There's no separate web signup to create before you can start using it.
Someone else has your phone for a second
A friend borrows your phone to take a photo, or your kid wants to play a game — and you don't want them landing in your gallery by accident and finding something you didn't mean for them to see.
The vault sits behind its own pattern, a credential that's never written to disk — not to a file, not to the Keychain. Your phone's normal lock screen and gallery behave exactly as they always do; the vault is a separate space with its own entry.
If someone enters a pattern the vault doesn't recognize, the app opens a fresh, empty vault instead of throwing an error. There's no vault list or switcher for a snoop to notice something's missing — a wrong pattern just looks like an empty app.
Photos you don't want anywhere but this device
You've got scans of IDs or medical images you specifically don't want sitting in Google Photos' cloud. Weave Vault requires no account of any kind and runs no analytics, crash reporting, or advertising SDKs, so nothing about the files leaves your phone by default.
If you later want an off-device copy, encrypted backup copies the vault's ciphertext to your own iCloud or Google Drive — never a Weave Vault server, and never the vault key or plaintext.
Restoring from a backup never requires a subscription, so files you already backed up stay reachable to you.
Features that make this work
Pattern unlock with a decoy empty vault
Gives you a credential that's never written to disk — not to a file, not to the Keychain — and turns a pattern the vault doesn't recognize into a blank, empty vault instead of a lockout screen. Nothing to explain if someone else is holding your phone.
Multiple vaults
The app doesn't count or display how many vaults exist on the device, so you can keep IDs, medical images, and everyday private photos in separate vaults with separate patterns, with no number anywhere hinting how many there are.
Encrypted backup
Lets you keep an off-device copy in your own iCloud or Google Drive without trusting a Weave Vault server with it — only ciphertext leaves the phone, never the key. Restoring from a backup never requires a subscription.
In-app camera
Shoots new sensitive photos straight into the vault, so they never pass through the default Android gallery or trigger Google Photos' automatic backup in the first place.