PP Vault : Picture Password

A vault protected by a picture password nobody can watch you type. Files, photos, video, logins, notes and two-factor codes, in folders you name and colour, on one phone and nowhere else.

Your passwords are typed in public. On a train, in an office, at a counter, in front of whoever happens to be looking. A picture password is not typed at all. Letters and numbers float over a photograph you chose, you drag the grid until your character sits on your spot, and you let go. The grid reshuffles every time, so watching one unlock teaches nothing about the next.

HOW IT WORKS

One photograph. Two characters. Two spots, one for each. Your character turns up several times on the grid, so the one you were aiming with is not one anybody can pick out.

Any folder can be locked again on its own, with its own drags or a typed password. A locked folder stays out of search, out of favourites and away from the autofill sheet.

Wi-Fi Hide works on a vault or on one folder. Off the network you named, the right password does not open that vault, and that folder is not in the list at all.

BACKUPS, AND THE WAY BACK

One encrypted file holding every vault on the phone, not only the one you are in, written wherever you put it: a folder on the phone, or a PP Vault folder in your Google Drive, by itself on a schedule if you like, so a lost or broken phone loses nothing. Seventeen written-down words open the file on any device, and your picture password opens the vaults inside it. Your photograph travels in the file. Your two spots and your words do not, so they are the parts you have to remember.

Write the words down. There is no reset, no recovery email and nobody to ask. Ten wrong attempts erase the vault on that phone, which is the point of it.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

No account to make and no sign-in: the vault is a file on your phone, sealed by a key the phone will not hand out. Nothing is uploaded unless you choose Google Drive for backups, which uses your Google account and carries only the encrypted backup file, which Google cannot open.

The free version shows one advertisement, on the folder screens and nowhere else. Never where a password is entered or anything out of a vault is shown. PP Vault Pro removes it for a one-time payment.

Location, on a password vault, deserves an explanation. A vault, or one folder inside it, can be set to open only on a Wi-Fi network you name, and Android will not tell an app which network it is on unless that app can also ask for location. So the app asks, and reads the network's name. No coordinate is ever read, stored or sent, and you are only asked if you set such a rule.