A private place for the photos that aren't for everyone.
Fifth Pocket is a photo and video vault for iPhone. Named after the small pocket on your jeans: nobody uses it, nobody looks in it.
Encrypted, not just hidden
AES-256 encryption, keyed from your pattern. Nothing readable on your phone, in your backups, or in iCloud.
You can't be locked out
A recovery key you save at setup. Real encryption and a way back in if you forget the pattern. Most vaults give you one or the other.
Never only in one place
Encrypted backup to your own iCloud, on by default, with a visible "last backed up" status and an export button that always works.
The price you paid is the price
Free for your first 50 items. Then one lifetime unlock. No subscription, no trial, no premium tier added later.
Fifth Pocket is coming to iPhone. Real encryption, a recovery key so you can't be locked out, and one price you pay once. Want to know the day it's out?
Tell me when it's out Opens an email to us. One reply when the app launches, nothing else.How it compares
Most photo vault apps hide files behind a PIN screen and leave them readable on disk. The good ones encrypt. Few give you a way back if you forget your code, and several have moved people who paid once onto subscriptions. We read 12,000 recent App Store reviews so you don't have to.
The biggest name, with cloud sync and a big feature set. In 1,000 recent reviews, 44% were one or two stars — mostly crashes and photos missing after updates.
Polished and well-liked. Its 2026 complaints are almost all one thing: people who bought it outright years ago being asked to subscribe.
Real on-device encryption, a recovery passphrase, and a lifetime option. The closest app to what we are building; the honest differences are the free tier, the price and how much it does.
Fine for keeping photos out of your main library. It hides, it does not encrypt, and it syncs to every device on your iCloud account.
The disguise is clever. In 1,000 recent reviews, 45% were one or two stars, with ads and videos lost after iOS updates the common themes.
Which vault apps still let you pay once and keep it, which quietly moved to subscriptions, and what each actually encrypts.
Why another vault app?
Because the complaints in this category are not about hiding. People are not writing one-star reviews saying "it didn't hide my photos". They are writing them because an update deleted everything, because the app they paid for now wants a monthly fee, because ads started appearing next to their private pictures, or because they forgot a PIN and there was no way back.
Fifth Pocket is built around those four failures and nothing else. It does less than the apps on the list above. It is meant to.