Case study · Built with Claude Code

Cryptile: built with Claude, kept away from your data

Cryptile is an encrypted vault for photos, videos and documents on iPhone and iPad. Its whole promise is that your files never leave your device. So Claude is deliberately not inside the app. Claude's role is in how the product was designed, built and shipped.

The product

• Draw a pattern to open it. A different pattern opens a different vault, including a decoy.
• Encrypted on the device. Every file, thumbnail and index uses AES-256-GCM, with keys made on the phone from the pattern you draw.
• No account and no server. We never hold your keys. No analytics and no trackers.
• Recoverable. The iCloud backup is encrypted too, and a 9-word recovery phrase restores it.

Where Claude fits, and where it doesn't

Instead, Claude Code works as part of the team that builds the product. A small company can ship an app with real cryptography, an App Store presence and a multilingual website because Claude does a large share of the engineering and operations work, with a person deciding what ships.

What Claude Code did

Product and engineering

• Building app features, from the vault grid and search to dark mode
• Working through the encryption design: keys derived on the device, decoy vaults, and making sure setup can't skip saving the recovery phrase

Shipping on the App Store

• Preparing builds for TestFlight and App Review, drafting review notes, and fixing what reviewers flagged
• Keeping the listing honest: removing any mention of features that haven't shipped yet, before review could catch it
• Setting prices country by country

The website

• Building and deploying cryptile.app on Cloudflare, with checks after every deploy and automatic rollback if the site breaks
• Help guides shaped by what people actually search for, in the languages they search in
• A visitor counter that counts real people and filters out scanners, with no tracking of who they are

How we work with Claude Code

• A person approves anything that can't be undone. App Store submissions, prices and anything sent in the company's name wait for a human yes.
• Everything reversible moves fast. Website changes that pass their checks deploy on their own, and roll back on their own if they break.
• Privacy is a constraint, not a feature request. Claude works on the code and the listing. It never has access to anyone's vault, because no such access exists.