Help with Witnessed

A normal photo carries metadata that anyone can edit: the date, the location, even the image itself. A Witnessed capture is fingerprinted with a SHA-256 hash the moment it is taken, and that fingerprint is sent to an independent timestamp authority which signs it under RFC 3161.

Anyone checking the file later can confirm two things they could not confirm before: that the file has not changed by a single pixel, and that it existed at the exact moment the authority signed it. Neither of those depends on trusting you, or on trusting us.

Witnessed produces the kind of evidence that stands up to scrutiny: an independent, verifiable record of what a file contained and when it existed. RFC 3161 trusted timestamps are an established international standard used across legal and financial record-keeping.

To be straight with you: courts, deposit adjudicators and insurers assess evidence on its own merits, and no app can guarantee an outcome. What we can say is that a tamper-evident certificate from a recognised timestamp authority is considerably harder to dismiss than an ordinary phone photo with editable metadata.

In your own private iCloud database, using Apple’s CloudKit framework. They are never uploaded to Witnessed servers. We cannot open, read or retrieve them. Only you can, through your Apple ID.

The only thing that leaves your device is the SHA-256 hash sent to the timestamp authority, and a hash cannot be turned back into your file.

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address to hand over. The app uses your existing Apple ID for iCloud storage, and that’s it.

Share the file together with its PDF certificate. The certificate contains the file’s SHA-256 hash and the signed RFC 3161 timestamp token from the authority. Anyone with standard tools can hash the file themselves and confirm it matches the signed token. That includes any competent IT expert, a solicitor’s technical adviser or an insurer’s assessor.

The verification does not go through us, which is the point: it works even if Witnessed doesn’t exist any more.

You can always capture. The timestamp token has to be requested from the authority over the internet, so if you are in a basement flat or an underground car park the item is captured and held as pending, then timestamped automatically as soon as you have a connection.

Items awaiting their timestamp are marked Pending in your library so you can see at a glance what has been sealed and what hasn’t.

Capture room by room at check-in and again at check-out, using the same case label both times so the sets line up. Photograph anything that could later be argued about: carpets, walls, worktops, appliances, meter readings, keys handed over.

Export the certificates as PDFs and send them to the other party the same day. Evidence that both sides have seen from the start settles most disputes before they become disputes.

Your evidence lives in iCloud, so it is not tied to the handset. Sign in to the same Apple ID on a new iPhone, install Witnessed, and your library and certificates come back.

All purchases go through Apple, so refunds are handled by Apple rather than by us. Go to reportaproblem.apple.com, sign in with your Apple ID and select the Witnessed purchase.

If something went wrong on our side, such as a certificate that failed to generate or a charge that looks wrong, email us first and we will help you make the case.

On your iPhone: Settings → tap your name → Subscriptions → Witnessed → Cancel Subscription. You keep Pro until the end of the period you have paid for.

Certificates you have already created stay valid and verifiable forever. Cancelling never invalidates evidence you have already captured.

Delete individual items in the app, or remove everything at once: Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Witnessed → Delete Data.

Because we never held a copy, there is nothing on our side to delete. Once it is gone from your iCloud, it is gone, so export anything you might need first.

iPhone and iPad, on recent versions of iOS and iPadOS. An Android version is not available yet.