We would rather be checkable than impressive.

Most vaults will help you if you forget your password. Sit with what that sentence requires. Somewhere there is a record, a reset, a person or a process that can put you back inside — which means a route in exists that isn’t you, and it exists whether or not you ever use it.

Weave Vault has no such route. If you lose your pattern and your recovery phrase, we cannot help you. That is the same fact as: nobody else can be helped either.

Every vault on the store advertises AES-256. None of them are lying, and none of them are telling you anything — AES-256 is the solved part. What separates one vault from another is the step before it: how your pattern becomes a key, and how expensive a single guess is to make. That step differs between apps by orders of magnitude, and it is the number almost nobody prints.

Ours is Argon2id, at 64 MiB of memory per attempt — memory-hard by design, so guessing cannot be parallelised cheaply across a rack of GPUs. When a vault won’t tell you its answer to that question, the silence is the answer.

Both of those are the same habit. There is a kind of sentence that keeps appearing in privacy software: it contains an absolute, and it is enormously satisfying to write. It is also unverifiable, which is the problem — the people such sentences impress are precisely the people with no way to check them, and the day the claim matters is the day it turns out to have been decoration. We would rather every claim here be small enough for you to check.

This is not only an editorial preference. The app carries a test that reads every user-facing string and fails the build if forbidden copy appears in it — the absolutes, the claims about what an examiner could or couldn’t determine, the wording that would turn a failed unlock into a hint. This website runs the same check against its own built pages. If someone here writes a promise we can’t keep, the build stops before you ever see it. We would rather rely on that than on our own restraint.

What we hold to

1. Nothing stored is nothing to steal

   Your pattern is never written to disk — not in a file, not in the keychain, not as a hash. There is no account, no password record, and nothing on our side that represents you. The surest way to keep a secret is to not hold one.

2. Every pattern opens its own vault

   There is no vault list, no switcher, and no message telling you a pattern wasn’t recognised. An unfamiliar pattern opens a fresh, empty vault — not because we hid the error, but because in the code it is the same path. The count stays in your head.

3. The exits are never locked

   Pro opens doors: more vaults, encrypted backup, sharing, folders. It never locks one behind you. Restoring a backup, opening a share, browsing and exporting your own files all work without a subscription, including after one lapses. Nothing you have already put in is held hostage.

4. What leaves your device leaves sealed

   Backup and sharing are opt-in, and what travels is ciphertext. Apple and Google hold bytes they have no key for. We run one small service, so that expiry and revocation on a share are enforceable rather than a promise — and it holds half a key, which opens nothing by itself.

5. If you lose both, we cannot help you

   There is no support process that opens your vault, because there is nothing on our side to open it with. That is an awkward sentence to put on a marketing page. It is also the honest consequence of building it this way, and we would rather you read it here than discover it later.

Who this is for

Weave Vault is built for the ordinary way private things get seen. A phone handed over to show one photo. A child who wanted to play a game. Someone who already knows your passcode, because most people close to you do. A friend scrolling one image further than you meant.

That is not a small problem for being a common one — it is the way it nearly always happens. Software that aims only at dramatic threats tends to be sold with dramatic promises, and we would rather be excellent at the situation you will actually be in.

What we will not add

Some things are missing on purpose, and will stay missing.

• Face ID, Touch ID, or a PIN. Each needs something stored to check against. A pattern doesn’t: it is the input the key is derived from, and it is discarded the moment the vault opens.
• An account. No sign-up, no email, no profile — and so no password reset, which is a door however politely it is named.
• Analytics, crash reporting, ads. None in the app, and none on this website.
• A way in for us. No master key, no recovery service, no quiet second copy of anything. We could not read your files if we decided to.

Who is behind it

Weave Vault is made by Silmaril Software, a small team in Hyderabad, India. Nobody funds us to collect anything, which is a large part of why there is nothing to collect. If you want the technical detail behind any of the above, the security page names the constructions precisely enough to argue with.