Coming Soon: One Vault on iPhone and Android, and Shared Vaults Across Both

Until now, Kinship Vault on Android and Kinship Vault on Apple were two good apps that did not talk to each other. Your iPhone, iPad and Mac shared one vault through iCloud; your Android phone kept its own through Google Drive. If your work phone was an Android and your personal phone an iPhone, or your family was split down the middle, you had two vaults and a manual export between them.

That ends with the next update. There are two halves to it, and they work the same way on both platforms.

Half one: your vaults on every device you own

On the device that already has your vaults, open Settings → Link a New Device and tap Connect an Android device? (on Android, the same screen offers Connect an Apple device?). After Face ID, Touch ID or your fingerprint, a code appears for 60 seconds. On the new phone, choose Bring My Vault and scan it. That is the whole setup.

The vaults land on the new phone as your vaults, not as a guest copy. They look and behave exactly like any other personal vault: add a document on the Android, and it appears on the iPhone; change a password on the Mac, and the Android's AutoFill has the new one.

Only the vaults you choose

Not every vault belongs on every phone. In Vaults, Choose vaults for your Android lets you pick. Only the vaults you tick appear on the other platform; the rest stay on your Apple devices. On Android the mirror is Choose vaults for your iPhone.

Half two: shared vaults that don't care what phone you have

Shared vaults were Apple-only because they ran on iCloud's sharing. Now a shared vault can include people on Android too. Create the vault, tap Invite People, and send the link or show the QR. It opens in the app on either platform. When someone asks to join, you see the request, check that the characters on their screen match yours, and approve. Nobody gets in without that tap.

Everyone you let in is a Member: they read and write with their own keys. Only you, the owner, invite, approve or remove. Removing someone rotates the vault's keys, so they are locked out of everything written afterwards. We wrote up the full walkthrough in how to share a vault between iPhone and Android.

Why iCloud and Google Drive stay in charge

We could have moved everyone onto one sync server. We deliberately did not. Your Apple devices keep syncing each other through iCloud, exactly as they do today, and your Android devices through Google Drive. The new piece is a relay that only carries changes between the two ecosystems. If it ever went away, each side would keep working and keep syncing within itself.

The promise, unchanged

Adding a relay did not loosen the rules Kinship Vault is built on. Everything is encrypted on your device before it leaves. A vault's key crosses the relay only sealed to the receiving device's own public key, so only that device can open it, and device private keys never leave the device. No key that your recovery passphrase could unlock is stored on the relay. The relay sees sealed records with no label saying what they are. The details, and what the relay does keep about a device, are in how cross-platform sync stays end-to-end encrypted.

What it will cost

Apple and Google keep purchases inside their own stores, so a purchase on one does not unlock the other. If a plan lapses, the cross-platform link pauses after a 24-hour grace period; nothing is deleted, and your Apple devices keep syncing each other through iCloud.

When

It is in testing now on both platforms and arrives in the next update for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android. Until then, you can still move a vault across with an encrypted export, your recovery passphrase, or your Recovery Network.