User Guide
Everything you need to know to get the most out of Deletable.
Getting Started
First launch
Two short intro screens, then one permission — notifications, so Deletable can warn you before something deletes. Camera, Photos, location and Face ID are never asked for up front, only the first time you use a feature that needs them. Pick a default delete time (7 days is preselected), and you are offered Deletable Plus once — tap past it if you like.
Meet your welcome note
Your vault opens with a sample note and a three-step walkthrough: tap a card to open it, watch its timer count down, and use + to add your own. The welcome note deletes itself after 30 minutes. To see the intro again, use Settings → Restart App Intro.
Add your first item
Tap the + button in the bottom-right corner of the vault and choose New Note, Take Photo, or Choose Photo. When you save a new note without having picked a timer, the timer sheet opens first and its button reads Save Note — choose one and the note is encrypted and filed in the vault.
Change your mind anytime
Open any item and tap the clock-arrow button at the top to pick a new delete time — it saves immediately. Notes open read-only; tap Edit at the bottom to change them, and your changes are re-encrypted when you tap Save Note.
Writing Notes
Create a note
Tap + → New Note. The title is optional — leave it blank and the opening words of the note become the title. The editor is true WYSIWYG: formatting renders inline as you type rather than showing you markup.
The keyboard toolbar
Above the keyboard sit the one-tap toggles — Bold, Italic, Underline, bullets and checklists — then Aa for the Text Style menu, and 📍 to drop a place into the note.
The Text Style menu (Aa)
Everything else lives here: strikethrough, a heading and a subheading, numbered lists, and text size. It also holds the font and colour pickers, which are Deletable Plus.
Use checklists
Tap the checklist button to turn a line into a tickable item. You can tick items straight from the read view without tapping Edit — the note saves on each tap. Checkboxes are real content, so they save, encrypt, and reopen with their state intact.
Reminders (Plus)
Tap the bell at the top of an open note to remind yourself about the whole note or about one checklist item — once, daily or weekly. A reminder about a checklist item carries Mark Done, which ticks that item straight from the notification. Turn on Delete when all done and the note deletes itself once every item is ticked. The bell fills in while a note has reminders pending.
Change text size
Size is picked from S / M / L / XL presets and applies to your selection — or to the next thing you type — never to the whole note. Tap the active preset again to clear it and fall back to the note’s base size.
Fonts & text colour (Plus)
Choose System, Serif, Mono or Rounded for the whole note, and colour any selection in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple or pink. Every other formatting control is free.
Drop a place pin
Tap 📍 and search for an address, tap the map, or use your current location. The place lands in the note as a map card, and tapping that card opens directions in Apple Maps. The pin is part of the encrypted note — it never leaves the device.
Reading, editing & sharing
Opening a note shows it read-only, with a live countdown to the second and the date it was created. The buttons at the top set reminders, extend its timer, share its text, or delete it (with a confirmation). Tap Edit to change it; Cancel asks before throwing away unsaved changes.
Share from another app
In Safari, Chrome, or any app that shares URLs or text, tap Share and choose Deletable. The share extension opens a Save to Vault screen — title, folder, timer, and notification controls — and save the content as an encrypted note.
On-device suggestions (iOS 26+)
With Apple Intelligence on, a note saved without a title gets a short generated one instead of its opening words. If a note mentions a date or time — "moved to Saturday at 2pm" — a Suggested: delete after … chip appears in the editor. It is never applied until you tap it (an exact date & time is Plus), and you can dismiss it. Everything runs on Apple’s on-device model; nothing is sent anywhere. Turn it off under Settings → Apple Intelligence → On-device suggestions.
Storing Photos
Take a photo
Tap + → Take Photo to open Deletable’s own camera, with flash (off / on / auto) and a front/back flip. Photos taken here go straight into the vault — they are never saved to your Camera Roll.
Import from your library
Tap + → Choose Photo instead and the system photo picker opens. Deletable only receives the one photo you pick — it never gets access to the rest of your library. Importing makes an encrypted copy: the original stays in Photos, so delete it there if you want it gone.
Set it up
Either way you land on one screen to set the title, an optional caption, the folder, delete time and expiry notifications before tapping Save Photo. Skip the timer and it takes the folder’s default, or your app default. The full image and its thumbnail are both encrypted immediately.
Mark it up
Tap Markup — on the New Photo screen before saving, or in the viewer afterwards — to draw on the photo with Apple’s pen, marker, pencil, eraser, lasso and ruler, pinch to zoom, and undo. Aa adds text in the current ink colour, with an outline so it reads on any background; drag or pinch a label to move or resize it, and tap it to edit or delete. Saving over a stored photo changes only the picture — its countdown, delete setting and notifications are untouched. Markup is free.
Captions & renaming
Add a caption under the title when you save a photo. Later, tap the title in the viewer to open Edit Details and rename the photo or change or clear its caption. Captions are encrypted like everything else, show under the title in the viewer, and are searchable — they never appear on the vault cards.
Nothing carries EXIF
Every import and capture is re-encoded on the way in, so a stored photo has no GPS coordinates, no capture timestamp, and no device model attached — the original file’s metadata never reaches the vault.
Share from the Photos app
In the Photos app, select a photo, tap Share, and choose Deletable. The Save to Vault screen lets you set a timer and folder and save it straight into your vault.
View & save a copy
Tap a photo card to open the full-size viewer, with buttons to extend, share or delete it. To keep a copy before the timer fires, share it, or long-press the card and choose Save a Copy — the copy leaves, and the original still deletes on schedule.
Live Text
When a photo contains text or a code, a text button appears in the viewer. Tap it to select and copy text, or tap a phone number, address or link to act on it. The analysis runs entirely on-device and the photo is never written anywhere to do it.
Deletion is total
When a photo expires, both the encrypted file and its thumbnail are permanently removed from device storage — not just hidden.
Deletion Timers
The free ladder
1h · 24h · 7d · 30d · Never. One clean rung per time scale, plus keep-forever. Tap one in the Delete After sheet to apply it; the rungs marked ✦ are Plus.
Precise timers (Plus)
Deletable Plus fills in the rungs between: 30 min, 3 / 6 / 12 hours, 3 / 5 / 14 days, and 6 months — plus Custom (any number of days and hours) and Date & Time for an exact moment.
Location-triggered deletion (Plus)
At the bottom of the timer sheet, choose On Arrival or On Departure and pick a place, and the note deletes itself when you reach or leave it instead of on a countdown. The trigger radius is set in Settings → Location Radius: 100 ft, ¼ mile (the default), 1 mile, or 5 miles.
Delete after reading (Plus)
Pick Read+5m, Read+1h or Read+24h in the timer sheet and the countdown does not start until the item is first opened — then it deletes 5 minutes, 1 hour or 24 hours later. Until then its card reads Unopened, and it holds no reminder and stays out of the widgets and Live Activity, since there is nothing to count down yet.
How deletion actually runs
Expired items are purged when you launch the app, every time you bring it back to the foreground, every few seconds while the vault is on screen, and by a background task in between — so an expired item is always gone before you can see it. The background pass is what gets it off disk sooner, so keep Background App Refresh on for Deletable.
If background deleting stalls
If the background sweep has not completed in over a week, an orange Background Deleting Paused row appears under Settings → Deletion. Items still delete whenever you open the app — tap the row for what to check (on iPhone, Background App Refresh) and a shortcut to system Settings. When all is well, the row stays hidden.
Colour-coded countdowns
Every card shows a live countdown. Green means more than a week left; cyan, less than a week; orange, less than a day; red, under an hour. Never, and delete-after-reading items not yet opened, show in grey, since they are not counting down.
Folders
Create a folder
Tap the New Folder tile on the shelf under the vault title. Give it a name, pick from 24 colours, and choose an icon — an SF Symbol from the curated grid, or any emoji you type. The free tier keeps up to 2 folders; Plus removes the cap.
Folders open in place
Tapping a folder re-renders the vault around it rather than pushing a new screen, so folder to folder is one tap. The grid, search, multiselect, and the + button all scope themselves to the open folder. To get back out, tap the Vault tile on the shelf or tap the Vault tab again.
The main vault shows loose items
With no folder open, the vault lists only items that are not in a folder — if everything is filed it says so rather than looking empty. Search from there, though, and it covers the whole vault, folders included.
Set a default timer per folder
Each folder carries its own default delete time. Items you add while it is open pick that timer up automatically, so you are not choosing one every time.
Folder self-destruct (Plus)
Turn on Auto-delete this folder and it deletes itself — and everything inside it, even items with longer timers of their own — when the clock runs out. A countdown banner sits under the header while that folder is open.
Edit, reorder or delete
Long-press a folder on the shelf, or tap ··· while it is open, for Edit Folder, Move Left / Move Right, and two ways to delete: Delete Folder keeps its items in the vault, unfiled; Delete Folder & Items removes everything in it too.
Security & Privacy
Two layers of encryption
Encryption is always on — there's no toggle. Every note and photo is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it is written, and GCM is authenticated, so tampered or damaged data throws rather than decoding to garbage. The database holding them is itself encrypted with SQLCipher under a separate key, so titles and previews are sealed on disk too. Keys live in the iOS Keychain.
Lock the app
Settings → App Lock → Lock App, then choose a method. Face ID / Touch ID uses your biometrics, with your device passcode as the fallback. Passcode sets a separate 4-digit code just for Deletable, which you can change later under Change Passcode.
Passcode attempts are throttled
Five free attempts, then a 10s / 30s / 1m ladder that survives a force-quit. The delay is capped at 1 minute, so nothing can lock you out of your own vault for longer than that. With Erase After 10 Failed Attempts on there are no waits at all — the erase is the protection. Biometric failures are not throttled — the OS already rate-limits those.
Erase after 10 failed attempts
With a passcode set, Settings → App Lock → Erase After 10 Failed Attempts wipes the vault after ten wrong passcodes in a row and turns the app lock off. It is off by default, the last three attempts warn you first, and a wipe interrupted by a force-quit finishes on the next launch.
Duress passcode
Settings → App Lock → Duress Passcode sets a second code for when you are made to unlock the app. Entering it erases the vault without any warning and opens it empty, as though nothing was ever there. It then becomes your passcode, so Settings shows nothing unusual. Only available with a Deletable passcode, not Face ID.
Configure the lock timeout
Settings → App Lock → Lock After decides how long the app can sit in the background before it locks: Immediately, After 1 Minute, After 5 Minutes (the default), After 15 Minutes, or Never.
No screenshots, no screen recording
Screenshots and screen recordings of Deletable come out blank for as long as the app is open. When you switch apps, the app-switcher preview is blurred too.
Blur Vault Preview
Settings → Privacy → Blur Vault Preview hides note text and photo thumbnails on the vault cards until you open them — useful if people can see your screen.
Erase Vault
The Erase Vault button at the bottom of Settings wipes every note, photo and folder at once, along with the encrypted files, scheduled notifications and live geofences. It sits behind a two-step confirmation that names the exact item and folder counts. Your stats and achievements are deliberately kept — the confirmation says so.
No cloud sync of content
Your vault never leaves your device. Only anonymous, aggregated counts are ever synced — and Settings → Privacy → Anonymous Usage Stats switches even those off.
Kept out of backups
By default the vault is excluded from iCloud and computer backups, so restoring one can never bring back items that already deleted themselves — a new or restored iPhone starts with an empty vault. To carry unexpired items across, turn on Settings → Privacy → Include Vault in Backups.
Deleted means scrubbed
When an item is deleted, its database pages are overwritten and the write-ahead log is truncated, so no trace of its title or preview lingers in free space on disk.
Notifications & Reminders
Expiration reminders
Expiration Reminders are on by default, 5 minutes before deletion. Under Settings → Notifications → Remind Me you can pick any combination of lead times — 1, 5 or 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day before — and change them and the reminders reschedule themselves.
Per-item reminders
When creating or editing an item, the Notifications button sets its own reminders: App default follows Settings, None silences it, or pick lead times just for that item.
Act straight from the notification
Every expiry reminder carries Keep 24 More Hours (it resets the timer to 24 hours from that moment) and Delete Now, so you can decide the moment it arrives. If the item was already deleted, the app tells you rather than quietly doing nothing.
If reminders stop working
When notification permission has been denied or revoked while the in-app toggle is still on, Settings → Notifications shows "Notifications Blocked" — which otherwise means scheduling reminders that can never fire. Tap it to jump to system Settings; it re-checks every time you come back.
Nothing leaks to the lock screen
Expiry reminders never name your item. They always read "A note or photo deletes in 5 minutes" — whether or not the app is locked. Reminders you set yourself (Plus) just say "Reminder" unless you turn on Settings → Notifications → Show Note Content, which adds the note’s title and the checklist item — never the note itself.
Add to Calendar (iPhone)
Settings → Notifications → Add to Calendar (off by default) puts a generic "Deletable item deletes" event for each timed item into a separate Deletable calendar, so iCloud carries the alert to your Mac and iPad. Nothing from the item is included. It needs iCloud Calendar; turning it off, or Erase Vault, deletes the calendar.
Live Activity countdown
When an item enters its final hour, a live countdown appears on the Lock Screen and — on iPhone 14 Pro and later — in the Dynamic Island, and in the Smart Stack on a paired Apple Watch. It is on by default; switch it under Settings → Notifications → Live Countdown. Location-triggered items have no countdown, so they are excluded.
Widgets, Siri & Shortcuts
Home & Lock Screen widgets
Deletes Soonest shows a live countdown to your next deletion, on the Home Screen or the Lock Screen. The small size has Note and Photo buttons (Photo opens straight to Deletable’s camera); the medium size has Add Photo and Add Note. Trash Level shows your achievement tier and how many deletions until the next one. Both carry counts and times only, never titles or content.
Control Center & Action button
Add New Deletable Note or New Deletable Photo — each drawn as the Deletable raccoon with a badge — to Control Center, the Lock Screen, or the Action button for one-press capture. If the app is locked, the unlock screen comes first.
Quick actions
Long-press the Deletable app icon and choose Add Note or Add Photo. If the app is locked, the unlock screen comes first and the action runs after.
Siri & Shortcuts
Say "Add a note to Deletable" or "Add a photo to Deletable" and the app opens straight to the add flow — behind the unlock screen, if your lock is on. "Check my Deletable vault" tells you how many items you have and when the next one deletes, without opening the app. In the Shortcuts app, Add Note and Add Photo can also be handed text or an image to save, and Search Vault opens the vault's search with your term filled in. Every action needs your iPhone unlocked, and content only ever goes in — Siri gets that count, never a title or a word of your notes.
Keyboard shortcuts
With a hardware keyboard attached: ⌘N and ⌘⇧N for a new note or photo, ⌘F to search, ⌘1 / ⌘2 / ⌘3 to switch between Vault, Stats and Settings, ⌘E to share the open note or photo, ⌘A to select all, ⌘⌫ to delete a selection (the confirmation still appears), and Esc to leave selection mode.
Apple Watch
Link it once
Install Deletable on your Apple Watch, then open Deletable on your iPhone once. That links the watch; until then it tells you to do exactly that.
Jot a note from your wrist
Type or dictate a note, choose when it deletes — App default, 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 5 min after reading, or Never — and tap Save to Vault, or double-tap to save without touching the screen. A confirmation shows whether the note is waiting for your iPhone or already there, and what its timer will do once it lands; a note that fails to send stays put with Try Again. 5 min after reading is a Plus timer; on the free tier the note takes your app default instead.
Sealed for your iPhone
The watch encrypts each note to a key only your iPhone holds and sends it over the watch connection. It moves into your vault, still sealed until then, the next time Deletable opens on your iPhone; the watch shows how many are waiting. The watch can add notes but can never read your vault.
Complication, Smart Stack & Siri
Put the Deletable complication on a watch face, or the New Deletable Note control in Control Center, for one tap to a new note. Say "Add a note to Deletable" to Siri on the watch. A Live Countdown from your iPhone also shows in the watch Smart Stack.
Vault Layout, Search & Batch Actions
What a card shows
Each card carries the title, a live countdown, and either a photo thumbnail or the first lines of the note — plus a folder pill and a place pill when those apply.
1 or 2 per row
Settings → Appearance → Vault Layout switches between a single-column list and a two-column grid (the default).
Sort your items
Settings → Appearance → Vault Sort Order offers "Soonest to Delete" (the default) or "Recently Created" (newest first).
Search
Tap the magnifying glass in the vault header. The search field floats just above the tab bar, in thumb reach, and its ✕ clears your query or closes search. Deletable matches titles and the start of each note as you type, and highlights the matched words right in each card. Inside a folder, search covers just that folder.
Deletion timeline
Tap the calendar button beside search to see everything by the day it deletes: a swipeable week strip with a count per day above an agenda. Filter by All, Notes or Photos, or by folder; toggle photo thumbnails (hidden while Blur Vault Preview is on); and find Never, location-triggered and unopened after-reading items in a collapsed Unscheduled section. Items in a self-destructing folder are dated by whichever deadline comes first. Opened from inside a folder, it shows just that folder.
Long-press a card
Long-press any card for Select, Save a Copy, or Delete Now. Delete Now removes it on the spot — there is no trash to restore from.
Select several at once
Choose Select from that menu, then tap more cards to add them. The header lets you move them to a folder, extend all their timers, or delete the whole selection after one confirmation — with Select All and Deselect All alongside.
Stats & Achievement Tiers
View your stats
The Stats tab shows items deleted (split into notes and photos), space freed, an estimate of the time you have saved, and a trash pile that grows with your tier. If you use location-triggered deletion, it also counts deletions on arrival and on leaving.
Achievement tiers
Everyone starts as a Newcomer. Delete items to climb 11 tiers: Trash Panda (3) → Bin Raider → Compost Connoisseur → Average Raccoon → Dumpster Diver → Route Raider → Landfill Legend → Distinguished Raccoonian (1,000) → Orbital Debris Officer → Cosmic Composter → Event Horizon (10,000). A progress bar shows how close the next one is, and when you earn a tier away from Stats, the Stats tab wears a dot until you go and see the celebration.
Share your stats
Tap Share My Stats to render a styled card of your tier, items deleted, and space freed. Pick its look in the theme row just above the button: Classic is free; Paper, Midnight and Raccoon are Plus themes. Every theme keeps the deletable.app footer.
Expiration habits & pace (Plus)
Plus adds a ranked breakdown of which timers you actually pick, plus your delete pace — "deleting for 92 days · 4.2 per week." The headline totals, the tier ladder, and the share button stay free.
Deletable Plus
What the ✦ means
A cyan ✦ marks every Plus control, in place of its checkmark, radio, or chevron. A marked control is never disabled — tap it and the paywall opens explaining what it unlocks.
Upgrade
Settings → Deletable Plus opens the paywall: $0.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 once for lifetime access. It is also offered once at the end of first-run onboarding, where it is dismissible.
Manage or cancel
Once you are a member, that same screen becomes a membership card — your plan, member-since date, and either your renewal date or when access ends. Manage Subscription takes you to the App Store to change or cancel it.
Restore on a new device
There is no account, so Plus rides on your App Store purchase. Tap Restore at the bottom of the paywall and it comes back.
Settings Overview
Default delete time
Settings → Deletion → Default Delete Time sets the timer every new item starts with. Folders can override it with their own default.
Theme & app icon
Choose Dark (the default), Light, or System under Appearance → Theme. On iOS, App Icon swaps the home-screen icon for Raccoon Face, Raccoon Light, Trash Can or Shredder — a Plus feature; the default Raccoon stays free.
Turn analytics off entirely
Settings → Privacy → Anonymous Usage Stats. Off means no statistics are sent, and any queued payload is dropped rather than sent later. Crash reports and purchase checks are separate and still run. On, it syncs aggregate counts against a random device ID — never content, never anything that identifies you.
Accessibility
Deletable follows your system settings: Increase Contrast switches to a higher-contrast palette, Reduce Transparency replaces the glass tab bar with a solid one, Reduce Motion calms the animations, and every control is labelled for VoiceOver and TalkBack.
Your device ID
Settings → About shows the app version and the random device ID your anonymous stats are keyed to. Tap the ID to copy it — it is what you would send us if you ever wanted that record removed.
Restart the intro & get help
Restart App Intro runs the first-run screens again on the next launch — the default-time choice and a fresh welcome note included. Nothing already in your vault is removed. FAQs & Help, under About, opens this site’s help page.
Ready to start deleting?
Free download. No account. No compromise.