Common questions.

VAND ships unsigned (no $99/yr Apple fee — that cost would come out of your pocket, not ours), so macOS Gatekeeper is cautious the first time. It’s safe to open:

1. Right-click (or Control-click) VAND in Applications → Open → Open again.
2. If it’s blocked, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
3. If it still says “damaged”, open Terminal and run this once, then open VAND normally:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/VAND.app

It opens normally every time after that.

VAND's installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may pause the first launch. Click More info, verify the app name is VAND, then click Run anyway.

You can verify the exact installer and its SHA-256 hash on the public GitHub releases page.

The 14-day trial needs no key. If you buy Intelligence or Max, checkout sends you straight to a page showing your key. Copy it, then open Settings → License in VAND and paste it in. The key is verified locally. If the key page does not appear, email vand.app.ai@gmail.com with your checkout link.

Yes. Everything you log lives in a single AES-256-GCM encrypted file on your own disk in VAND's local application-data folder. No account, no cloud, no sync unless you turn it on. To see it for yourself, open Settings → “What VAND knows about you” — it shows exactly what’s stored and that zero bytes have ever left the machine.

Tracking doesn't. Logging, imports, charts, and questions about your own data are answered on your Mac with no model and no network. The AI chat does, because it uses the provider you picked with your own key — that's the one thing that leaves, and only when you use it. Prefer nothing to leave? Point it at your own Ollama model on localhost instead, or flip on Tinfoil mode in Settings to hard-cut every network call.

Never. VAND has no cloud LLM. Chat, the morning brief, and pattern detection run against your data on your computer. That’s the whole point — an AI with no parent company reading over your shoulder.

Settings → Export writes a plain JSON file of everything — habits, logs, journal, the lot. It’s yours to keep, move, or feed into anything else. One click, no lock-in.

Settings → Delete all data wipes the encrypted file after a confirm. It’s gone from your disk — there’s no server copy to chase, because there was never a server copy.

Yes — Settings → Apple Health pulls in sleep, recovery, and activity through your own iCloud Drive export, entirely on-device. It unlocks the recovery score and energy curves on the Health tab.

The latest release supports Windows 10/11 x64. VAND is also available on macOS for Apple Silicon and Intel. Paid license activation is Windows-first today, so Mac users should keep using the trial until the paid-capable Mac update ships. Linux is not published yet.

VAND checks for updates and lets you install the latest with one click. You can always grab the newest build from the download page.