Hilia started life as an Android app and then came to the browser. Today it lands on the last two places people asked for it: Hilia: Hide Like a Pro is live on the iPhone and iPad App Store, and Hilia Desktop is live on the Mac App Store. Both are built natively for Apple's platforms — not a phone app stretched to fit a bigger screen.
Same secret, same vault, wherever you are
If you've used Hilia on Android, nothing about how it works has changed — it's the same idea, rebuilt from the ground up for iOS and macOS. A file, photo, or note gets woven into the pixels of an ordinary-looking cover photo. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; hiding and revealing both happen entirely on your device. Everything you already trusted about Hilia on your phone carries over:
| Feature | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Steganography, not just encryption | A hidden file looks like an ordinary photo, not an obviously locked file |
| Encrypted on-device vault | Your secrets and passcode never leave the device |
| Decoy vault | A second, real-looking vault to show if you're ever pressured to unlock your device |
| Split across photos | Bigger secrets get spread across several cover photos automatically |
| Scatter to your photo library | Hidden photos blend into your camera roll instead of sitting in an obvious separate album |
| Free global leaderboard | Optional and separate from your vault — it never sees what you've hidden |
Why the Mac app costs something and the iPhone app doesn't
Hilia: Hide Like a Pro on iPhone and iPad is free to download, the same ad-supported model as Android, with no account required to hide or reveal a secret.
Hilia Desktop is different on purpose. It's a one-time $9.99 purchase with no ads at all. A vault you open with a keyboard and a trackpad felt like it deserved to stand on its own, without an ad interrupting you mid-task — so instead of carrying ads over from the phone app, we charged a fair price once and left them out entirely.
Built for the platform, not just ported to it
Both apps are native — built directly against Apple's own frameworks for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, not a web view or a phone layout stretched onto a bigger screen. On Mac that means Hilia behaves like a Mac app should: a resizable window and a vault that opens straight into the same photo-picking flow you already know from Photos.
Try it
Both are live on the Apple App Store now.
If you're on Android, nothing's changed — and if you'd rather stay in the browser, the web version still does steganography and watermarking from any device.


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