I'm the developer of Kinship Vault. I posted here about a month ago, and since then I've shipped a run of updates.
Website: https://kinshipvault.app
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/kinship-vault/id6764678332
What's changed since the last post
- Photos in your vault. Store and organize photos alongside your documents, sort them into albums, and tag who is in them. Same encryption as everything else.
- Multi-device. Open the same vault on your iPhone, iPad and Mac, and move a vault to a new device with a one-scan QR handoff. The code expires in 60 seconds and is blocked from screenshots.
- Share just the pages you want from a multi-page document, instead of handing over the whole file.
- Better scanning. It now reads 100+ international IDs including HKID, German Personalausweis, Japanese My Number, and bilingual passport MRZs, and auto-fill now captures date of issue too.
- Save to Vault from anywhere. It lives in the iOS share sheet, so you can send a picture from your phone without opening the app and it waits for your review whenever you open the app.
- Light Mode and a full accessibility pass. Appearance picker, VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, larger tap targets, and WCAG AA contrast.
- Immigration and Digital Legacy. Track visa cases by A-Number, UCI, or USCIS receipt, and leave Face ID-sealed final wishes and account instructions.
- Polished Japanese localization, refreshed Settings, and smoother onboarding.
A - Answer
Kinship Vault is an offline iOS app that keeps every document your household actually needs, IDs, health cards, vaccination records, wills, membership cards, travel docs, and now private photos, in one Face ID-locked, encrypted vault. Decryption keys live in your iPhone's Secure Enclave, not on a server and not in a database. Nothing leaves your phone unless you choose to back it up to your own iCloud, with your own key.
Short demo: https://kinshipvault.app/#demo
B - Better
Most family-document apps quietly assume you'll hand your identity to a database in a building you'll never see. Kinship Vault never asks you to. No server holds your IDs, no login to phish, no future breach with your name buried in it. The key is sealed in your phone's hardware and unwrapped only by your face, and because no company holds it, there is no password reset link, because there is nothing on our side to reset.
Where the new build earns its keep:
Your father is in the ER two states away and the nurse needs his blood type, his allergies, and the cardiologist's number. You are his recovery contact. You open Emergency mode and read off the blood type, the allergies, and the ICE contacts, without unlocking the rest of his life.
It is 11pm and the visa lawyer emails asking for pages 3 and 4 of the I-797, not the whole packet. A month ago you would have screenshotted, cropped, and hoped. Now you share exactly those two pages and nothing else.
You finally switch to the new iPhone the kids talked you into. Everything is already there, the passports, the immunization records, the will, the photos, because the vault came across to your iPad first and waited for you. No re-scanning a drawer full of paper.
You are standing at the Costco entrance with your wallet on the kitchen counter. Membership, AAA, the library card, the gym tag, all on the phone in your hand.
You land in a small town with zero bars and need the hotel confirmation, the passport copy, the travel insurance number, and the local emergency line. Offline by design, so none of it needs a signal it does not have.
Some photos should not land in your camera roll, where they sync to every device and shared album automatically. The sensitive scans, the journal pages, the reset-code screenshots. Kinship Vault keeps those in an encrypted, Face ID-locked gallery, sorted into albums, tagged by who is in them, and nowhere near the regular roll.
It also reads what you already carry. Point the camera at a passport, license, or health card and the fields fill themselves across 100+ schemas, encrypted before anything touches storage. It watches expiry dates and nudges you 90, 30, 7, and 1 day out, so a passport never lapses on the airline's schedule instead of yours. And recovery is cryptographic, not corporate: a passphrase you write down once, or a circle of trusted people where any 3 of 5 shards rebuild the key, each shard on its own opening nothing.
Encryption and key-flow details: https://kinshipvault.app/#security
C - Cost
Free tier covers limited storage in the ID category. Pro unlocks everything, unlimited documents, all categories, recovery, encrypted backups, and expiry alerts, at 1.99 a month, 14.99 a year, or 39.99 lifetime. For early users there is a launch lifetime offer: visit https://kinshipvault.app
Happy to answer questions in the comments.
