This is not a help desk, and we are not going to pretend it is. Sovereign Vault is made by one small company, and mail goes to a person rather than a queue.
More importantly: there is a category of problem nobody can solve, because of how the app is built. Those are listed below rather than buried, so you find out here instead of finding out later.
What we can and cannot do
We can
- Answer questions about how the app works
- Take a bug report and tell you what we're doing about it
- Tell you exactly what the app stores and where
- Issue a refund on Google Play
We cannot
- Open your vault, or reset your PIN
- See your records — we hold no copy of them
- Issue a refund on the App Store — only Apple can
The second column is not a policy choice and it is not us being unhelpful. Your records are encrypted with a key derived from your PIN, and that key exists only on your phone. We have no copy of it and no way to derive one. If we could open your vault, so could anyone who compelled us to — which is the entire reason the app is built this way.
One thing belongs outside that list, because it is a different kind of no. We do not have a repair tool for a vault whose file has been damaged, and we are not promising one. That is a limit of what we have built, not a law of physics — if you still know your PIN, some of a damaged vault may in principle be readable by tooling that does not exist today. We would rather say that plainly than let it sit in a list of genuine impossibilities and quietly borrow their weight.
If you cannot get into your vault
Work through these in order. They are ordered by what is most likely to help, not by what is easiest.
1. Try your PIN again on a fully restarted app
Close Sovereign Vault completely — swipe it away, don't just switch apps — and reopen it. Some unlock problems are a stale session rather than a wrong PIN.
2. If you have an encrypted device backup from before the problem, restore it
This is the only route that has ever brought a vault back, and it only exists on iOS.
- On iOS: the key material sits in the iOS Keychain, and the Keychain is included in encrypted iCloud and computer backups. Restoring one of those to your device may bring the key back with it. An unencrypted computer backup excludes the Keychain entirely and will not help.
- On Android: the key material in the Keystore is excluded from Android's automatic backup, so a restore on its own will not bring your PIN-based access back. If you set up a recovery code, the file that code unlocks is a normal file and is carried in backups — deliberately — so on Android a restore plus your recovery code is the route, rather than a restore alone.
- Face ID and fingerprint unlock never survive a restore, on either platform. That is expected. Biometric unlock is a shortcut to the same key your PIN reaches — if a restore worked, your PIN still opens the vault and you can turn biometrics back on.
We have to be straight about the confidence here: this is how the platforms document their own behaviour, and we have not yet run a full restore ourselves to confirm it end to end. It is worth trying before you do anything else, and we would rather tell you that than imply a certainty we have not earned.
3. If neither works
Then the records in that vault are gone, and starting a new vault is the only way forward. Setting a new PIN creates a fresh, empty vault and leaves the old data permanently unreadable. Nothing about that is reversible, so exhaust step 2 first.
Things we know about
Your watch can stop sending data without telling you
Sovereign Vault reads what Apple Health or Health Connect actually holds. If the app that writes to Health stops doing so — a permission changes, an update resets something, a companion app is signed out — the data simply stops arriving, and nothing announces it. This has already happened to one of our testers, who lost ten days of readings while both apps appeared to be working.
If a metric looks stale, check the app that owns it before assuming Sovereign Vault is broken. It usually isn't, and we would rather say that plainly than let you spend an evening on the wrong problem.
Worth knowing separately: not every watch writes every metric. Some devices never send heart rate variability to Apple Health at all, regardless of what they show you in their own app. Where that is the case, we cannot read a number that was never written.
A storage defect we have not fixed
The database engine the app is built on carries a known flaw that can, rarely, lose a recently saved entry without warning. There is no corrected version available to us yet. It is described in full on the security page, and it is the reason we suggest copying your record out from time to time.
Reaching us
It goes to a person, not a ticket system. We are not going to promise a response time we cannot keep — but every message is read, and there is no queue in between.
If you are reporting a problem, these help more than anything else: which phone and OS version, what you did immediately before it happened, and what you expected instead. Please do not send us your health records. We do not want them, we have nowhere to put them, and we cannot do anything useful with them.