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Vaults and duress

Each pattern opens its own vault. Two special kinds of vault change what happens on this device.

Decoy vault

A decoy vault is an ordinary vault with its own pattern. It is free. Opening it does nothing to your other vaults, so it can hold content you are comfortable showing.

Duress vault (Pro)

A duress vault is for the case where someone forces you to unlock your phone. Drawing its pattern opens it as usual, with no visible difference. It also does the following on this device:

• Removes every other vault. This happens at once.
• Removes shared vaults you have received.
• Clears this device’s sync key.
• Resets the usage totals to the duress vault’s own counts.

Your encrypted iCloud backups are not deleted. Your recovery phrase can restore those vaults later, on this device or another one. Backups exist only if backup was on; vaults that were never backed up cannot be recovered. See Backup and recovery.

What someone else sees

• The lock screen shows only the pattern grid. It does not list vaults.
• A wrong pattern shows the same message whether or not a vault exists.
• Settings never shows a vault’s type. In a vault, Settings → This vault → Change vault type lets you choose Standard, Decoy or Duress (Pro) from now on, without showing the current type.
• On the free plan, Settings shows the plan’s limits but not how much of them you have used, because device-wide totals could hint at other vaults’ contents.

Limits

• Duress is a Pro feature. On the free plan, you can create decoy vaults but not a duress vault.
• Removed data may remain physically in the device’s flash storage as encrypted data without keys. Without the keys it cannot be opened.