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Apps

Android app

zcrypt on your phone: a beta Android build on the same in-process encryption engine as the desktop app, installed by sideloading an APK rather than through the Play Store.

What it is

The zcrypt Android app is a beta build that runs the same zcrypt interface on your phone. Under the shell, encryption, compression, chunking, and storage sync run in zcrypt-core, the same in-process Rust engine that powers the desktop app, not a browser sandbox and not a background subprocess. Because the engine is the same, a file encrypted on desktop opens cleanly on Android, and vice versa.

It is not on the Play Store. You install it by sideloading an APK directly, which takes about a minute.

Installing the APK

The APK is published alongside the other zcrypt builds. Grab it from the download page and install it yourself:

  • •Open the Android section of the download page on your phone and download the APK.
  • •When Android asks, allow installing from this source: sideloading an app from outside the Play Store needs that one-time permission.
  • •Open the downloaded APK to install, then launch zcrypt and sign in as you would anywhere else.
Because it is sideloaded, the app does not auto-update through the Play Store. To move to a newer build, download and install the latest APK again from the same place.

What beta means

The Android app is genuinely early, and we would rather say so than oversell it. The encrypted drive works (sign in, upload, browse, and download) but the app is younger than the web and desktop builds, so expect rough edges and fewer conveniences for now. Offline access and camera backup are on the roadmap, not shipped.

If a build for your phone gives you trouble, the web app runs the full product in your mobile browser in the meantime.

Same zero-knowledge core

The Android app is the same zcrypt, not a stripped-down sibling. Encryption and decryption happen entirely on your device, your vault passphrase is still never sent to the server, and everything you learn about how zcrypt protects your data applies here unchanged.

Like the desktop app, Android uploads directly to your own storage: BYOS-direct: desktop and mobile upload straight to the user's own GitHub, GitLab, Hugging Face, or Telegram account using credentials from the OS keychain, so the backend never touches the platform token. The web app is the exception, because browser sandboxing blocks direct platform access, so it relays ciphertext through the backend.

Because the cryptography is identical to every other platform, the recovery rules are too: lose your vault passphrase and your files cannot be decrypted on any device. Keep it in a password manager. See Account recovery.

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