Witness App: which one do you actually mean?

At least nine different things share this name. Here is how to find yours in ten seconds.

I make one of the apps below, so I have a stake in this page, and I am also the only person with a reason to write it honestly: everyone else listed here only describes their own product. If what you actually want turns out to be one of the others, the fastest thing I can do for you is say so and point you at it.

Start here

• A charity that trains people to film human rights abuse: that is WITNESS, the organisation, not an app at all.
• A map of live news events from people on the ground: that is thewitnessapp.com.
• Something about encrypted, anonymous reporting for survivors, still in development: that is witnessapp.org.
• A puzzle game with an island full of secrets: that is The Witness, and you are in the wrong place.
• A phone-as-security-camera app: that is Witness Cam.
• Something else entirely is covered further down.

Witness Camera: for documenting police, protests and ICE

This is the app this site is about, called Witness Record until September 2026. Listed on the App Store as Witness: Camera Beyond Reach, it films with the screen fully black and uploads footage in roughly 15 second pieces to a cloud account you own, while you are still recording, so a seized or smashed phone costs you seconds rather than everything. Free, iOS 17 and later, no account, no server on my end.

What it is, in full, including who makes it and exactly what leaves the device.

WITNESS, the human rights organisation

The one I would send you to first if this is what you meant. WITNESS is an international nonprofit that has trained people to document human rights abuse on video since 1992, long before phones could do it. It does not publish a consumer app under its own name. Its guidance is genuinely excellent and is cited throughout this site.

thewitnessapp.com: live event verification

A map-based platform where people present at a breaking event file geotagged, timestamped reports, which are corroborated against each other and surfaced with a confidence rating rather than by engagement. Aimed broadly at newsrooms and citizen journalists covering any kind of event, not specifically at documenting police conduct, though the underlying idea, verified firsthand reporting, overlaps with what this site is about.

witnessapp.org: an early-stage research project

An open source initiative exploring cryptographic timestamps and anonymous pattern matching to help vulnerable people document experiences and find others who have had similar ones. As of this writing it describes itself as still in a research and legal-feasibility phase, actively gathering legal feedback, rather than a released, installable app. Worth watching, not yet something to download.

The Witness: the puzzle game

A well-known single-player video game set on an open world island full of environmental puzzles, from Thekla, Inc. Nothing to do with documentation, recording or human rights, and the single most common reason "Witness app" returns results that have nothing to do with what this page covers.

Witness Cam, and other apps named Witness

• Witness Cam, an app for turning a phone into a security camera feeding an NVR system. A different job entirely.
• Witness Audio, an Android audio recorder that produces tamper evident recordings. Closest in spirit to Witness Camera, but audio only and Android only.
• Witness by Lockewerks, an Android photo documentation app that hashes and timestamps images with GPS and sensor metadata. Stills rather than video.
• iWitnessed, a research app built by cognitive scientists to help witnesses record a structured account of an event while memory is fresh. Not a camera app.
• iWitness Personal Safety Video, a personal safety recording app aimed at everyday emergencies rather than police or ICE encounters specifically.
• OpenWatch, an older project for turning a phone into a discreet recording device, in a similar spirit to several apps on this page.
• Alibi Witness, a dashcam and mobile recording app from Alibi Security, oriented toward personal evidence and vehicle use.

If what you need is Android, audio only, still photos, or a structured statement rather than video, one of these is a better fit than mine, and you should go and get it.

Unrelated entirely

Witness is also a Katy Perry album, a record label, a 1985 Harrison Ford film, a court form for logging testimony and exhibits, and, going back to 2015, an earlier live-streaming panic button app of the same name that is no longer active. If a search brought you here looking for any of those, apologies, and try adding a word like "album," "film" or "game" to find it faster.

Why this page exists

Because I watched this exact search return a puzzle game, a nonprofit, and at least three other apps before it returned anything useful, and nobody had written the page that just tells you which is which. I would rather lose a visitor to the right app in ten seconds than keep one who wanted something else.

Written September 2026. Other developers' products change; if something here is out of date or wrong, email me and I will fix it.