What Coldkeep protects against, and what it doesn't.

What Coldkeep doesn't protect against

1. A compromised phone while the vault is open. Malware with root, accessibility or screen access can see what you see.
2. Someone watching you draw your pattern. Hiding the trail helps; a passphrase helps more.
3. Being forced to unlock. v1 has no duress mode. Hidden vaults help inside the app, but forensic analysis can tell how many vaults exist. And someone who knows one of your patterns isn't slowed down by the wrong-guess delays when trying others on your phone: opening the vault they know resets them. A long pattern or a passphrase for a hidden vault is what keeps it out of reach.
4. Copies elsewhere. Deleting an original removes it from your gallery. It doesn't delete copies in Google Photos' cloud backup, chat apps or other backups, and flash storage may keep deleted blocks for a while (Android's own encryption protects those blocks, not us).
5. Losing both the phone (or your credential) and your recovery phrase. Then nobody can get your files back, including us. That's the price of real encryption.
6. Memory forensics. Clearing keys from memory is best effort.
7. Video recording. Videos from the Coldkeep camera sit in Coldkeep's private storage while recording and are encrypted the moment you stop.
8. Knowing you use Coldkeep. The app shows in your app list and your Play account's library.
9. A short pattern on a backup file. Someone who gets your backup file can try patterns on their own computer, without Coldkeep's delays and without your phone's secure hardware. A short or common pattern can be guessed in hours. A long pattern (8+ dots, not a letter or shape) or a passphrase makes it impractical, and your 12 words can't be guessed at all.

What Coldkeep protects against

1. Someone using your unlocked phone (a partner, a kid, a friend, a repair shop). They can't open Coldkeep without your pattern or passphrase. They can't see how many vaults you have, and screenshots and the recents preview are blank.
2. A thief, or someone who knows your phone's PIN. Your vault key comes from your Coldkeep credential, not your screen lock, and guesses on the phone get slower and slower.
3. A lost or broken phone. On a new phone, your backup file and your 12 words bring everything back.
4. Your cloud or backup provider (Google Drive, Dropbox, a USB stick someone finds). The backup file is encrypted. It hides names, thumbnails and how many items it holds, and it opens only with your pattern or passphrase or your 12 words. Point 9 below explains how strong that is.
5. Us. Coldkeep has no internet permission, no accounts and no analytics. We never receive anything, and we can't open your vault.
6. Someone who copies the app's files off the phone (forensic tools, root). On phones with secure hardware, they can't decrypt anything without your credential and that hardware, so they can't run guesses on a GPU farm. They can see how many vaults exist and roughly how much each holds.