Hippius Brings Encrypted Cloud Storage to Your Phone, and the First 10 GB Is Free

Bittensor’s storage subnet just landed in your pocket. Hippius, which runs as Subnet 75, has launched its mobile app on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. Anyone with an iPhone or Android phone can now back up their photos and files with encryption, starting with 10 GB free.

Hippius encrypts everything on your phone before it uploads. Your photos, videos and documents leave your device already locked, and only you hold the keys through your password and recovery phrase. Hippius can’t read your files, and neither can the network operators who store them. Most big cloud providers can’t say that.

By default, the big names keep a spare key. Google Drive and Google Photos encrypt your files, but Google holds the keys, so it can open them. Dropbox works the same way for personal accounts and only offers end-to-end encryption on business plans. Apple comes closest: iCloud can lock your photos so only your devices can read them, but only if you find and switch on a setting called Advanced Data Protection, which is off by default. With Hippius, that level of privacy is simply how the app works, even on the free plan.

The Hippius app works much like the backup apps people already know. It can back up your camera roll automatically in the background, on Wi-Fi only or for the albums you pick. You can preview photos, videos and PDFs inside the app, share files with a link, and lock the app with Face ID or your fingerprint. It uses the same account as the Hippius web and desktop apps, so a file you add on your laptop shows up on your phone too.

Signing up takes a few seconds with Google, Apple or GitHub, and those accounts get the free 10 GB straight away. After that, paid plans are month to month with no contracts. Hippius lists a 2 TB plan at $7 a month and that’s about 30% cheaper than comparable Dropbox or Google Drive plans. Downloading your own files is free.

Behind the app, your files aren’t sitting in one company’s data centre. Hippius splits each file into 30 pieces and spreads them across independent operators, and any 10 of those pieces can rebuild the file. Storage is checked on-chain all the time, and miners on Subnet 75 are paid for storage they can prove they’re providing.

The launch has been a while coming. The Android app went live in September, while the iPhone version spent weeks in Apple’s review, which the team said is especially careful with storage apps. The iOS release this month means both platforms are now covered.

For Bittensor, this matters beyond one app. Decentralised infrastructure often stays something only developers use. Hippius is now putting a subnet’s work into a phone app that people can use every day for their photos, with privacy and pricing that hold up against the big names.

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