Mars Interactive/Alcove - Vault for Everything
Hi, welcome to Alcove!
App Description (Last Update: September 16, 2026)
📱 Available Platform: 🍎 iOS
📅 Alcove Initial Release Date: TBD, 2026 on 🍎 iOS
Your Private Digital Space
A private space on your phone for the things you don't want anywhere else — photos, videos, notes, even the websites you'd rather keep separate from your regular browsing. Alcove locks all of it behind Face ID, a PIN, or a master password, and keeps it out of your camera roll, out of the cloud, and out of everyone's reach but yours.
Your phone wasn't built to keep secrets. Photos meant for no one else sit next to birthday party pics. Notes apps sync everything to the cloud by default. Browser history follows you across every tab. "Hidden" folders are one tap away from anyone who picks up your phone. And once something's in the cloud, "delete" is a request, not a guarantee.
Alcove changes that.
Nothing you put in Alcove touches a server. Ever — with one narrow, obvious exception: opening a site you've bookmarked has to reach that site, the same as any browser. Everything else — your photos and videos, your notes, your bookmarks themselves — is encrypted on your device with the same-grade cryptography (AES-256-GCM) protecting real secrets, sealed behind whichever of Face ID, your PIN, or your master password you choose to unlock with.
Core Features:
- Encrypted photo and video vault. Import from your camera roll through Apple's picker — Alcove only ever sees the specific items you select, never your whole library — and every file is encrypted at rest, not just hidden behind a folder.
- Face ID, PIN, and master password authentication, with recovery codes. Choose how you unlock, and the vault locks itself the moment you leave the app. Forgot your master password? Five single-use recovery codes, generated by you and yours alone, get you back in — no backend override, no support ticket, no one but you.
- Albums to organize your vault. Move, copy, and set custom covers, just like a normal photo library — except none of it is normal, because none of it can be seen without your credentials.
- Slideshow, on your terms. Customizable pacing and mode for reliving a set of photos and videos without ever leaving the vault.
- A decoy PIN with a hidden notes space. A second, separate PIN unlocks a plausible, unrelated notes vault instead of your real one — and removing it wipes clean, on purpose.
- Sites: your own sandboxed browser. Add a URL and open it inside Alcove, isolated from your regular browser and from every other site you've added — each with its own separate, encrypted storage, wiped along with everything else if you ever erase your vault.
- Encrypted export and import. Create your own backup of your entire vault, on your terms — a single encrypted archive you control, that you can move to a new device whenever you're ready.
- Zero cloud, zero sync, zero analytics. Nothing about what you store, or that you use Alcove at all, is tracked or sent anywhere.
Alcove is the closest alternative to Secure Folder on iOS there is.
Your Privacy, Protected:
- Zero tracking.
- Zero ads.
- Zero data harvesting.
- Zero cloud backup, by design — Alcove is deliberately excluded from iCloud and device backups, and there is no password-recovery mechanism beyond the recovery codes you generate yourself.
That's the same design choice that keeps your vault unreadable to anyone else: it means we can't read it either, and neither can you if you lose your credentials and your codes. Choose credentials you'll remember, and keep your recovery codes somewhere safe.
I'm Timothé, a solo developer operating under the nickname Mars Interactive for my development endeavors. I'm building tools for fun and to impact people' lives positively (hopefully). Alcove is one of my apps, and I built it with zero guidance and assistance. Alcove is 100% free, ad-free, offline, and private to your device alone.
If you're enjoying it and want to support ongoing development, you can Buy Me a Coffee here!
Note: Mars Interactive is not a registered legal entity, it is only a developer nickname used informally. The legal entity and owner of Alcove, this document, and all included files is Timothé Ameline.