LockLens: Private Photo Vault

LockLens does both: it strips your photo's location data the moment it's taken, then locks everything in an AES-256 encrypted vault only you can open. It's a private gallery app that lets you hide photos and videos behind a PIN or biometric lock — with no subscription and no account required.

THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR CAMERA APP
Every photo you take with Android embeds your GPS location, device model, and exact timestamp. Share that photo and you've shared your home address. Many photo vault apps have been flagged for spyware or aggressive data collection. LockLens was built to fix both problems at once.

HOW IT WORKS
Shoot with the LockLens camera and EXIF metadata is stripped before the photo is saved to your vault — no location, no device fingerprint, no timestamp. The brief capture buffer stays in private app storage and is wiped immediately; the metadata never reaches your gallery or any share target. The photo is then AES-256-GCM encrypted and stored in your device's private app storage, where only LockLens can read it. Unlock with fingerprint, face, or a vault-only PIN.

FREE TIER
- Secure camera (all photos are EXIF-clean)
- Encrypted vault (up to 25 photos)
- Biometric unlock
- Import photos from your gallery (they're stripped and encrypted too)

PRO — $4.99 ONCE, NO SUBSCRIPTION
- Unlimited photos and videos
- Video vault with in-app playback
- App disguise — change LockLens's home screen icon and name to look like a Calculator or Notes app, so the vault stays invisible on your app drawer
- Decoy PIN — a second PIN that opens a fake empty vault instead of your real one
- Break-in selfie — failed unlock attempts secretly snap a front-camera photo of whoever's trying to get in. It's encrypted and stored in your intrusion log.
- Auto-delete — automatically wipe vault photos after a set number of days
- Secure share — share a photo from the vault without it ever being saved to your gallery
- Photo albums
- Encrypted backup & restore — export your vault to a password-protected file and restore it later, even on the iOS version of LockLens

WHY NO SUBSCRIPTION?
Other vault apps charge $3.99/month — that's $48 a year, forever, just to store your own files on your own phone. LockLens charges $4.99 once. That's less than one month of the competition, and you own it.

TECHNICAL DETAILS FOR THE SKEPTICS
- AES-256-GCM encryption with per-file unique IVs
- Keys stored in Android Keystore (hardware-backed on supported devices)
- No INTERNET permission — confirmed in the manifest, verified in the Play Console Data Safety section
- No analytics, no crash reporting, no ad network SDKs
- allowBackup is disabled — your encrypted files will never appear in a cloud backup. Pro's backup/restore feature is a separate, explicit export to a file you choose and control — it's never automatic and never touches Android's or Google's backup systems.
- No INTERNET permission at all, so Android blocks every network connection at the OS level — there is no code path that can phone home. The bundled network security config additionally forbids cleartext traffic as defense in depth.
- PIN stored as PBKDF2-SHA256 (200,000 iterations) — not plaintext, not a simple hash
- Open to security researchers: if you find a vulnerability, email steve@richfieldlabs.com

PERMISSIONS
- CAMERA — for the secure camera and break-in selfies
- USE_BIOMETRIC / USE_FINGERPRINT — for fingerprint/face unlock (the legacy fingerprint permission covers Android 8.0-8.1)
- WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE (Android 9 and older only) — used only if you choose to export a photo from the vault back to your device gallery
- com.android.vending.BILLING — for the one-time $4.99 Pro purchase
- POST_NOTIFICATIONS — to notify you when a break-in selfie is captured

No contacts, no location, and no internet permission of any kind.

Recent changes:
Target Android 16 (API 36) and upgraded in-app billing for continued Google Play compliance. Added predictive back gesture support. Minor stability fixes.