Vaultry is now an installable app on every device that matters. Add it to your iPhone home screen, install it from Chrome on your Android phone or your laptop, launch it from macOS Spotlight or the Windows Start menu — it runs in its own window, separate from your browser, looking and behaving like any other app on your machine.
Under the hood it's a Progressive Web App (PWA). The web codebase you already use every day is the same code that runs in the installed app — no separate native version, no app store delays, no platform-policy risk. Today's improvements ship to your installed app the same minute they ship on the web.
Why a PWA, not a "real" app?
Two reasons.
Apple's App Store rules around firearms are restrictive. Apple's Submission Guidelines disqualify any app whose primary purpose is to "facilitate, enable, or encourage" certain firearm-related activities, and they've gotten more aggressive about enforcing it on tracking apps that even mention guns prominently. We didn't want our roadmap held hostage to an annual app review fight.
PWAs are now genuinely good. As of Safari and Chrome's 2024 / 2025 releases, installed PWAs get home-screen icons, splash screens, full-screen mode, the camera (for our scanner), notifications, and offline-capable storage. The gap between "installed PWA" and "native app" closed for our use case. We can't ship a frame-rate-critical game this way, but we can absolutely ship a fast, offline-aware collection manager.
How to install
iPhone / iPad: Open app.vaultry.app in Safari. Tap the Share button (the square with the up-arrow). Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen. Confirm the name. Vaultry now lives next to your other apps. Open it and notice it runs without Safari's address bar.
Android (Chrome): Open app.vaultry.app in Chrome. Tap the three-dot menu and select Install app (or Add to home screen on older Chrome). The first time you visit, Chrome may also show an install banner at the bottom of the screen.
Mac (Chrome or Edge): Open app.vaultry.app. Look for the install icon in the address bar (a small monitor with a down-arrow). Click it and confirm. Vaultry now appears in your Applications folder and in Cmd+Space Spotlight.
Mac (Safari): Safari on macOS got installable PWAs as of macOS 14 Sonoma. From the File menu, choose Add to Dock. Vaultry now lives in your Dock and launches in its own window.
Vivaldi / Brave: Both inherit Chrome's installability. From the menu, choose Save as App (Vivaldi) or look for the address-bar install icon (Brave).
Windows (Chrome or Edge): Same as Mac — the address-bar install icon, or the three-dot menu. The app appears in your Start menu.
What works in the installed app
Everything. The scanner uses your device camera the same way; the gallery, audit, and bulk-add flows are identical; backups download to your Downloads folder as expected. Login through Google OAuth completes in the installed window with no redirect drama.
A few small things even feel better in the installed app: the camera scanner gets a fullscreen viewfinder without browser chrome cutting into it, file uploads pull from the device picker instead of a browser overlay, and switching between Vaultry and another app uses your normal app-switcher rather than tab-shuffling.
What's coming next
This is Phase 1 of our PWA rollout — installability. Phase 2 adds offline-aware browsing so you can pull up your inventory without a connection (handy in a basement safe room, a coin-show booth, or a remote firearms-class facility). Phase 3 wires a smoother install prompt and per-browser install instructions for the cases where the affordance is hidden. Phase 4 adds an in-app update notice so a deploy doesn't sneak past you mid-task. Phase 5 covers iPhone full-screen polish and standalone-mode QA.
The plan is on the public roadmap. If anything in the installed-app experience feels off on your device, let us know — we read every report.
A note on size and cost
A PWA install is essentially free on your device — a few megabytes of cached JavaScript and assets, no separate runtime, no background services chewing battery. Uninstalling is the same as removing any other home-screen icon or app shortcut: no leftover services, no registry entries on Windows.
If you've been waiting for "the Vaultry app" before logging your collection from the couch instead of the desk, it's already here. Open the link, tap install, and start scanning.