Somewhere to keep the things your family always needs

Every family runs on a set of facts that live in exactly one person’s head. The garage code. The wifi password at the cottage. Aunt Jane’s new address. Which day the bins go out at your mum’s. Whether it is the ninth or the tenth.

These end up in a notes app on one phone, or in a chat message from 2019, or nowhere at all — which means one person gets asked every time, and when they are unreachable the answer simply is not available.

The vault in Family is a shared place for them. People, places, codes and notes, visible to everyone in the family and to nobody else. Birthdays entered here surface on the board a fortnight ahead, so the first you hear of one is not a photograph of the cake.

It is encrypted the same way everything else is: sealed on your device under a key only your family holds. A door code is exactly the sort of thing that should not be sitting in a company database in readable form, and here it is not.

You can record a birthday as a day and month without the year, because plenty of people will happily write down their sister’s birthday and not her age.