Getting Relic
Relic is on the App Store as Relic: Clipboard Vault. On your home screen it is just Relic. One app covers the iPhone and the iPad.
Open it and sign in with the same account you use elsewhere. Continue with Apple is one of the buttons, so you can use Sign in with Apple and never hand over an address. Then unlock with your vault passphrase, and everything you have saved appears as the first sync finishes.
How things get in
An iPhone does not let any app watch the clipboard in the background, so capture here is something you do on purpose. There are three ways.
- The share sheet. In any app, tap Share and pick Relic. A link, a photo, a file or some text goes straight into your vault.
- A Shortcut. Make a shortcut that opens the address
relic://capture, call it Capture to Relic, and bind it to a double tap on the back of the phone or, on an iPhone 15 Pro and later, to the Action Button. Copy something, tap, and Relic grabs it. - The plus button. The gold button at the bottom right writes a new item by hand, with attachments if you want them.
Capturing on an iPhone has the shortcut step by step, and the app can reopen that walkthrough for you from its settings.
What the app does
- Search everything. Words across an item, its title, its preview, its filename and its tags, plus
tag:and a date range. Titles and tags your computer worked out sync down, so you can search by them here too. - All and Vault. Everything, or just the items you kept on purpose.
- Open an item to read the text, look at the picture, or see the file. Tap to copy.
- Edit, keep, tag, share and delete, from the item or its menu.
- Save to device puts an image or a file into Files or Photos.
- Pull down on the list to sync right now.
What it does not do
- No automatic capture. Nothing is saved unless you share it, tap your shortcut, or type it in.
- The models do not run here. Naming items, tagging pictures and reading the text in screenshots happen on your computer. The phone shows and searches the results; it does not produce them.
- No mini picker and no keyboard shortcuts. Those belong to the desktop app.
- No dragging an item out into another app.
On an iPad
Give Relic enough width and it splits in two: the list of items on the left, and whatever you tapped on the right, where an iPhone would have slid a panel over the screen. Editing, writing a new item and setting a reminder all happen in that right-hand pane.
It follows the window, not the device. Put Relic in a narrow Split View beside something else and it goes back to one column, then splits again when you widen it.
Formatting and secrets
When you copy an item back out, Relic hands over both flavours of formatting an Apple app might want, so Pages, Notes and Mail keep the bold, the links and the styling instead of pasting flat text. Turn that off and everything pastes plain. Things shared through the share sheet arrive as plain text, whatever app sent them, because that is all the share sheet carries.
Anything that looks like a key, a token or a card number is hidden behind dots in the list until you tap to reveal it. That is on out of the box.
Settings and appearance
Tap the gear at the top right for the settings sheet: the name this device's captures carry, whether captures go straight to your Vault, where files are saved, your devices, your recovery kit, and the rest. Settings on your phone goes row by row.
Settings › Appearance follows the system by default, so Relic turns dark when your iPhone does. You can pin it to dark or light instead.