Help & FAQ

Deletable is an iPhone app, with a companion Apple Watch app, and is available only from the Apple App Store. It is free to download; Deletable Plus is an optional in-app purchase. An Android version is planned for the future, but it is not available yet.

From the Vault tab, tap the + button in the bottom-right corner and choose New Note, Take Photo, or Choose Photo. Add your content and tap Save — if you have not picked a deletion time for a new note yet, the timer sheet opens first so you can choose one. Your item is then encrypted and added to the vault.

Settings → Restart App Intro. The first-run screens come back on your next launch, including the default delete time choice and a fresh welcome note. Nothing already in your vault is removed.

Every item has a built-in expiry. Once the timer runs out, the item is permanently and irrecoverably deleted — both from the vault and from device storage. The free timers are 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, and Never; Deletable Plus adds the finer steps between them, custom durations, and an exact date and time.

Yes. Open the item and tap the clock-arrow button at the top of the screen to choose a new delete time — it saves straight away. To change several at once, long-press a card, choose Select, tap the others, and use the extend button in the header.

Go to Settings → App Lock → Lock App and toggle it on, then choose a method. Face ID / Touch ID falls back to your device passcode if biometrics fail. Passcode sets a separate 4-digit code just for Deletable, which you can change later under Change Passcode. Lock After sets how long the app waits in the background before re-locking.

⌘N and ⌘⇧N create a note or photo, ⌘F opens search, ⌘1 / ⌘2 / ⌘3 switch between Vault, Stats and Settings, ⌘E shares, ⌘A selects all while multiselecting, ⌘⌫ deletes the selection (the confirmation prompt still appears), and Esc leaves selection mode.

No. Deletion is permanent and irrecoverable by design. Once an item expires or you delete it manually, there is no backup and no recovery path. This is a core privacy feature, not a bug. If you want to keep something before its timer fires, long-press the card and choose Save a Copy to export it to Files or your Camera Roll.

It still gets deleted. Expired items are purged when you launch the app, every time you bring it back to the foreground, 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 rather than what makes deletion work: iOS schedules that kind of task opportunistically, so gaps of a day or more between background runs are normal and harmless.

Deletable tracks when the sweep last completed. If it has been quiet for more than a week, a "Background Deleting Paused" row appears under Settings → Deletion with what to check — while all is well, the row stays hidden. It reports what actually happened rather than asking the OS a question the OS cannot answer — which also covers every possible cause at once: Background App Refresh being off, Low Power Mode, or iOS deprioritising an app you rarely open.

Yes — Expiration Reminders are on by default, under Settings → Notifications. You'll get a notification ahead of deletion, at whichever lead times you pick — 1, 5 or 10 minutes, an hour, or a day before — set globally or per item. Every reminder carries Keep 24 More Hours and Delete Now buttons, so you can decide right there.

Yes, on iPhone. Turn on Settings → Notifications → Add to Calendar (it is off by default). Deletable then adds an event for each item with a deletion time to its own separate "Deletable" calendar, and iCloud syncs that calendar to your Mac, iPad and anywhere else you use iCloud Calendar, so those devices alert you too. It needs iCloud Calendar turned on; Google calendars on your iPhone aren't supported, because Google doesn't let apps add a separate calendar of their own. Every event is titled "Deletable item deletes" and nothing else: no titles, text or photos from the item, and no notes or links. The events do sync through iCloud like any calendar, which means the times items delete are stored in your iCloud account. Events are removed as items are deleted or their timers change, and turning the setting off deletes the whole calendar. One thing Deletable cannot control: iCloud keeps its own archive of deleted calendars for a while (iCloud.com → Data Recovery).

Settings → Erase Vault deletes every note, photo and folder in one action, along with the encrypted files, scheduled notifications and live geofences. If Add to Calendar is on, it also turns it off and deletes the Deletable calendar and every event in it, and the confirmation tells you so. It sits behind a two-step confirmation that names the exact item and folder counts. Your stats and achievement tier are deliberately kept — wiping a vault shouldn't inflate your lifetime deletion count or vault you several tiers for pressing one button.

Yes. Every note and photo is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before being written to the local database — and that database is itself encrypted with SQLCipher under a separate key, so titles and previews are sealed on disk too. GCM is authenticated, which means damaged or tampered data throws an error instead of silently decoding to garbage that gets shown to you as though it were your note. Your master key is stored in the iOS Keychain and never leaves your device.

There is no reset and no recovery — nobody, including us, can unlock your vault for you. Failed attempts are throttled: five free tries, then waits of 10 seconds, 30 seconds and 1 minute that survive a force-quit. The wait is capped at 1 minute, so a wrong clock or a corrupted record can never lock you out for longer than that. With Erase After 10 Failed Attempts on there are no waits at all, because the erase is the protection. Biometric failures are not throttled, since the OS already rate-limits those.

No. A stored photo carries no EXIF at all — no GPS coordinates, no capture timestamp, no device model. Every import and capture is re-encoded on the way in, so the original file's bytes never reach the vault. A test pins that behaviour specifically so a future "keep original quality" option couldn't restore it silently.

Your vault content never leaves your device. Deletable syncs only anonymous, aggregated statistics (item counts, bytes freed) to our Supabase backend — tied to a random UUID, never your identity. And you can switch that off entirely.

Yes — Settings → Privacy → Anonymous Usage Stats. With it off, no statistics are sent. Crash reports and purchase checks are separate and still run. Turning it off also discards any payload already queued for retry, so nothing built while you had it on gets released later.

When analytics is on: fully anonymous counts — items created and deleted, bytes freed, current tier, vault totals, app opens, and which features are used. These are linked to a random device UUID generated at first launch, not your name, Apple ID, Google account, or any identifying information. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Yes. Your vault is blurred in the app-switcher preview. You can also turn on Settings → Privacy → Blur Vault Preview to hide note text and photo thumbnails on the vault cards until you open them. Expiry notifications never name your item — the alert reads "A note or photo deletes in 5 minutes" rather than saying what it is. Reminders you set yourself say just "Reminder" unless you turn on Settings → Notifications → Show Note Content.

On purpose. Deletable blocks screen capture for as long as the app is open — screenshots and recordings come out blank, so nothing in your vault can be captured by you, a screen-recording app, or anything else on the device. To keep a copy of something, long-press its card and choose Save a Copy.

Importing makes an encrypted copy in the vault; Deletable never gets access to your photo library, so it cannot remove the original. Delete it from Photos yourself if you want it gone. Photos taken with Deletable's own camera (+ → New Photo → Take Photo) never reach your Camera Roll in the first place.

All vault content is stored locally and will be removed with the app. The anonymous UUID stored in Supabase will become orphaned but contains no data that can identify you.

No. Deletable uses an anonymous device ID stored in secure storage to track your stats. This ID is lost when the app is deleted, because iOS clears the Keychain when the last app from a developer is removed. There is no account system, so there is currently no way to recover your stats and tier progress after deleting the app.

$0.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 once for lifetime access. You buy it inside the app under Settings → Deletable Plus, through your App Store account — there is still no sign-up and no account with us.

Precise and custom expiry timers, an exact date-and-time picker, location-triggered deletion, delete after reading, reminders on notes and checklist items, unlimited folders, folder self-destruct timers, custom note fonts and text colours, the expiration-habit breakdown and delete pace on the Stats tab, the Paper / Midnight / Raccoon stat card themes, and the alternate app icons.

Everything that protects your data: AES-256-GCM encryption, biometric and passcode lock, the app-switcher blur, redacted notifications, EXIF-free photos, and the analytics opt-out. Plus the free expiry ladder, up to 2 folders, rich notes with checklists, sharing into the vault, Siri Shortcuts, widgets, Control Center, the Apple Watch app, photo markup and captions, the deletion timeline, Erase Vault, batch actions, all 11 achievement tiers, the full stats page, and the Classic shareable card.

No. Plus controls are marked with a cyan ✦ where their checkmark, radio or chevron would be, and dimmed slightly — but they stay tappable. Tapping one opens the paywall explaining what it unlocks. A locked control that simply does nothing is a dead end, so the app never ships one.

Nothing is taken away. Your notes, photos and folders stay exactly where they are. The free tier hides a number or a picker — for example the Classic stat card theme takes over so a card still renders, and your current app icon is left alone. Nothing behind a Plus gate can create, edit, or expire an item, so lapsing can never orphan content.

Tap Restore at the bottom of the paywall to bring Plus back on a new device. Once you are a member, that same screen shows your plan, your member-since date, and either your renewal date or when access ends — with a Manage Subscription link into the App Store. Lifetime purchases have nothing to manage, so that row is simply not shown.

Folders live on a shelf under the vault title. Tapping one re-renders the vault around it rather than pushing a new screen, so folder to folder is one tap — the grid, search, multiselect and + button all scope themselves to the open folder, and tapping the Vault tile or the Vault tab takes you back out. Each folder has a name, one of 24 colours, an SF Symbol or emoji icon, and its own default deletion timer. Long-press a folder (or tap ··· inside it) to edit it, move it left or right on the shelf, or delete it — either keeping its items in the vault or deleting them with it. The free tier keeps up to 2 folders; Plus removes the cap and adds per-folder self-destruct timers.

The main vault lists only the items that are not in a folder, so the shelf is how you get to the rest — if everything is filed, the vault says so. Search from the main vault, though, and it covers everything, folders included.

Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, a heading and a subheading, bulleted and numbered lists, and checklists — all rendered inline as you type. Text size comes from S / M / L / XL presets and applies to your selection rather than the whole note. The 📍 button drops a place into the note as a map card that opens directions. Custom fonts (Serif, Mono, Rounded) and text colours are Plus features; everything else is free.

Yes, with Deletable Plus. In the timer sheet, choose On Arrival or On Departure at the bottom and pick the place, and the note deletes itself when you get there or leave instead of on a countdown. The trigger radius is set in Settings → Location Radius — 100 ft, ¼ mile, 1 mile, or 5 miles. Deletable asks for location access the first time you pick a place, and your coordinates never leave the device.

Yes — it is on by default (Settings → Notifications → Live Countdown). When an item enters its final hour a live countdown appears on the Lock Screen of any iPhone — and in the Dynamic Island itself on iPhone 14 Pro and later. Location-triggered items have no countdown, so they are excluded rather than shown with a fake one.

Go to the Stats tab, pick a card theme, and tap Share My Stats. Deletable renders a styled card showing your tier, items deleted and space freed, ready to share anywhere. Classic is free; Paper, Midnight and Raccoon are Plus themes.

Yes. In Safari, tap Share and choose Deletable to save a URL or selection as an encrypted note. In the Photos app, select a photo, tap Share, and choose Deletable. Both land on the same screen as the main editor — title, folder, timer and notification controls — without opening the app first.

Long-press the Deletable icon and tap Add Note or Add Photo. If the app is locked, the unlock screen appears first and the action runs after. For glanceable info there are widgets too: Deletes Soonest (Home Screen or Lock Screen) and Trash Level.

Yes. It is for jotting quick notes: type or dictate, pick a delete time, and tap Save to Vault. Open Deletable on your iPhone once to link the watch. Each note is encrypted to a key only your iPhone holds and moves into your vault the next time Deletable opens there. After you save, the watch confirms whether the note is waiting for your iPhone or already there. The watch cannot show your vault — it can add notes but never read them. There is also a complication, a New Deletable Note control, and "Add a note to Deletable" for Siri on the watch.

Yes, with Deletable Plus. Open a note and tap the bell at the top to add reminders on the whole note or on one checklist item — once, daily or weekly. A checklist reminder has a Mark Done button that ticks the item from the notification, and Delete when all done removes the note once every item is ticked. Reminders say only "Reminder" unless you turn on Settings → Notifications → Show Note Content.

Yes. On iPhone, tap Markup on the New Photo screen or in the photo viewer to draw with Apple's pen, marker and pencil tools and add text labels — free, and it keeps the photo's countdown as it was. Captions work on both platforms: add one when saving, or tap the photo's title in the viewer to rename it or edit its caption.

Tap the calendar button next to search in the vault. The deletion timeline groups every item by the day it deletes, with a week strip of per-day counts above the list, and can be filtered to notes, photos or particular folders.

Not yet. Deletable is built for iPhone (with a companion Apple Watch app), and there is no iPad layout for now.

Check the Background Deleting row in Settings first — it reports when the sweep last finished. iOS can delay or throttle background tasks based on battery level and usage patterns, so make sure Background App Refresh is enabled for Deletable in Settings → General → Background App Refresh, and that Low Power Mode is off. Nothing is ever shown to you after it has expired — the purge also runs on launch and on every return to the foreground.

If permission was denied or later revoked, Settings → Notifications shows a "Notifications Blocked" row that taps straight through to system Settings and re-checks when you come back. Otherwise, verify that Expiration Reminders is on in Deletable → Settings → Notifications, and that notifications are enabled for Deletable in your device Settings.

This is expected if Lock App is enabled and Lock After is set to "Immediately." Change Settings → App Lock → Lock After to After 1 Minute, 5, or 15 to give yourself a grace period.

That usually means the App Store is temporarily unreachable or your device is offline — the prices come live from the store, so Deletable never shows a stale or hardcoded number. Close and reopen the paywall once you have a connection.

Use the contact form at the bottom of this page. We read every report.