VELREN

Personal safety beyond the screen

Spot signs of being followed.

VELREN is an iPhone app for personal safety in the real world. It detects signals from nearby devices along your routes, compares where and when they reappear, and alerts you to patterns that may indicate someone is following you. Analysis runs on your iPhone.

iPhone
iOS 26+
No account
Nothing leaves the device

Get VELREN on the App Store See how detection works

Why use VELREN

Notice devices that keep turning up.

A device near you on the bus may be a coincidence. The same signal appearing again near work, on a walk and on the way home deserves attention. VELREN compares these encounters across routes and days to help you spot possible tracking.

How detection works

From a radio signal to a warning

Detect signals, compare encounters and warn you about suspicious patterns. All analysis runs on your phone.

Detect nearby signals
During a protection session, VELREN detects Bluetooth signals from nearby devices and records your route and movement. Your monitoring mode controls how often it checks.
Compare device signals
VELREN uses the identifiers and signal characteristics available to compare observations, even when Bluetooth addresses change.
Look for repeated encounters
The app checks whether a device stays near you as you move, reappears in different places, or follows your turns and stops.
Check other observations
VELREN compares device signals with your route, movement, Wi-Fi observations and saved records. An alert requires support from more than one source.
Assess the pattern
The app combines these observations into a score from 0 to 100. The score reflects the strength of the pattern, not proof that someone is following you.
Explain the warning
When a pattern reaches your chosen alert threshold, VELREN sends a notification. You can review what triggered it and which observations support or weaken the assessment.

Signs of possible tracking

What VELREN checks

Does the same device stay nearby, reappear elsewhere, or move along your route?

Devices near you

Persistence: Something that keeps answering, scan after scan, while the rest of the room changes around it.
Reappearance: The same device falling out of range and coming back, again and again, over one session.
Suspicious return: A return after a long gap, somewhere the device has no ordinary reason to be.
Trackers: The advertisement patterns of AirTag, SmartTag and Tile hardware, raised only once one of them has actually stayed with you.
What a signal probably is: A deliberately cautious reading of a device type — phone, headphones, speaker, wearable, car. A manufacturer alone is never treated as proof of what a thing is.

Movement and route

Route correlation: Something that takes your turns rather than merely your direction — the difference between being followed and sharing a road.
Stop correlation: It stops where you stop, and it waits for as long as you do.
Timing: It turns up at the hours you do, on a rhythm that matches yours rather than the neighbourhood’s.
Movement anomaly: Detours and pacing that do not fit the way you normally move through the day.
Environment shift: The whole radio picture around you changing at once, which can mean you moved — or that something moved with you.

Places and networks

Zones you drew: Entering an area you marked as alerting raises a signal. A safe zone does the opposite and quietens the room; a monitored zone only makes VELREN look more often.
Wi-Fi anomaly: A familiar network name whose underlying hardware keeps changing in one place, or cycles unusually fast — the shape an impostor access point makes.

Things you marked before

Perimeter match: A signal out of one of your captures showing up somewhere else entirely. This is the strongest single thing the engine can say.
Watched signal: A signal you put under watch in the ledger turning up again, with its own rules about when that is worth interrupting you.

Memory

What VELREN remembers

Saved observations help compare what you see today with earlier journeys.

Perimeter captures

Capture the radio environment of a place that matters to you — your car, your flat, a hotel room — and VELREN keeps a sealed imprint of it under a name you choose. If one of those signals appears somewhere else, that is the heaviest evidence in the app. A match near where you took the capture does not count — that is simply the place being itself — and one device found in captures from two separate places escalates further.

A capture takes one tap from the main screen. You can also fix the environment after the fact, keeping what was around you over the last few minutes, even if the thought arrived late. Every perimeter can be switched on or paused together. A match can be renamed and opened as a report — full enough to hand to a lawyer, coarse enough to give nothing else away.

The observer ledger

When a session ends, what you saw is merged into a ledger that outlives it. The ledger counts how many separate places a signal has appeared in — the heaviest factor by far — how many distinct days, how far it stayed with you while you were moving, how long it was nearby, how many sessions it spans, how close it ever came, and whether it advertises itself as a tracker. Out of that comes a rank: Background, Recurring, Persistent, Follows you around. The rank is not frozen. It is recalculated every time you open it, so a new home or a new job moves it along with you.

A high rank is not an accusation. A courier on the same round every morning will score highly and mean nothing by it. It becomes a warning only when you put that signal under watch yourself.

The places you live in

VELREN learns where you spend real time and which signals belong to those places. A neighbour’s television is excused where it lives — and only there. Three districts away, the very same signal is judged as though the baseline had never existed.

Devices you trust

You can trust a signal as this one device, as a whole kind of device, or for the current session only. Trust is filed against a durable identity, so it survives the address rotation that would otherwise make yesterday’s decision worthless.

The session ledger

Every signal in a session is kept as a single row: the time it was actually observed rather than first-seen to last-seen, how close it ever came, and how far it stayed with you without a break. A device caught once in the morning and once at night is not recorded as having spent the day with you.

Incident records

An event can be kept as a report that is coarse enough to hand to someone: the place rounded to a few kilometres, the time rounded to the hour, no device fingerprints at all. Reports you import from elsewhere stay on this device and are never passed on again under your name.

Fewer false alarms

Checks before it alerts you

A nearby device alone is not enough to trigger a warning. VELREN checks the context.

A crowd is not a tail

In a dense Bluetooth environment, a device that lingers means far less, and evidence of that kind is damped accordingly. Independent location or Wi-Fi evidence is never damped this way.

Standing still is not being followed

When you are not moving, something that stays in range is doing nothing remarkable, and it is discounted heavily if that is all there is.

A minute proves nothing

Very short sessions are held back — except where the evidence came from another day, such as a zone you drew or a capture you took, which owes nothing to how long you have been watching just now.

One sense is never enough

Evidence from a single family, however loud, is capped below the alerting range. Something has to corroborate it before you are told.

A type match keeps its voice down

When a match rests on the kind of device rather than a fixed identity, it stays silent if another example of the same product is visible nearby — otherwise it would be a guess wearing the clothes of a finding.

At most once a day

A watched signal will not interrupt you more than once in twenty-four hours, no matter how often it is seen.

No flickering

The score rises quickly and falls slowly, and a level it has just reached is held for a while before it can drop, so a warning never blinks on and off while you are reading it.

The threat score

Reading the number

Zero to a hundred, in five bands.

Range	Level	What it means
0–19	Safe	Normal environment
20–39	Low	Minor anomalies
40–59	Elevated	Multiple correlated signals
60–79	High	Strong correlation patterns
80–100	Critical	Multiple independent confirmations

Sensitivity moves where the line for an alert sits, not what the evidence is. Low speaks up only for strong anomalies; High reacts sooner and more often. Whatever you choose, the reasoning behind a score stays open to read.

Everyday use

Tools for your journeys

Start a session, review your route and manage which devices you trust.

Protection sessions

A session is the stretch of time VELREN is actually watching. Monitoring modes run from Passive through Balanced and Active to High Alert — you choose how often it looks and what that costs in battery.

Sensitivity

Kept separate from the mode, because it answers a different question: where the line for an alert should sit.

Live Activity and Lock Screen

The state of a session stays visible on the Lock Screen, so you can check it without opening the app.

Journey history and timeline

The route, the events and every signal of a session, kept afterwards. History can be searched, and signals compared between one session and another.

Geofences

Zones you draw yourself: alerting where something should be raised, safe where the room should quieten, monitored where VELREN should simply look more often.

Trusted devices and Wi-Fi

A list for the familiar, so that what belongs in your life stops making noise in the app.

App Lock

A PIN and Face ID on the door of the app itself.

Incident export and import

A report coarse enough to hand to someone, and someone else’s report that stays on your device once you take it in.

iPad

A layout built for the larger screen rather than a phone screen stretched across it.

Onboarding and permissions

Each permission is asked for at the moment it is genuinely needed, and a single page shows how ready your protection is, as a percentage.

12 interface languages

English, Ukrainian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese.

VELREN dashboard showing a threat score of 0 out of 100 and the Safe level during an active protection session

A VELREN alert opened to show the observations behind it in plain language

A session in VELREN journey history with its route and events on a map

A saved perimeter capture in VELREN, listing the signals imprinted at that place

A VELREN session state shown on the iPhone Lock Screen

VELREN monitoring modes and sensitivity settings

Privacy

Your routes and observations stay on your device.

There is no account, no server and no analytics. The analysis, the ledgers, the baseline and your history live in encrypted storage inside this app, on this device, and the key never leaves it. Maps are the single exception: opening one asks Apple Maps for the tiles it needs.

No account and no sign-in.
No VELREN server. There is no back end for your data to sit on.
No analytics, no advertising, no telemetry.
Precise routes, event details, zones and device names are encrypted on the device with AES-GCM. The key is held in the Keychain and is not carried to another device.
History can be cleared at any time, and deleting the app takes everything with it.

One exception, stated plainly: opening a map asks Apple Maps for its tiles, under Apple’s privacy policy. Nothing else on this page reaches the network.

Limits

What detection can and cannot tell you

Awareness, not security

This is a tool for noticing patterns. It is not an alarm system, it calls nobody on your behalf, and it does not stand between you and anything.

What it does not claim

VELREN does not prove that you are being followed, does not measure distance from signal strength, and does not find every tracker. It shows what recurred and how well the evidence agrees; the conclusion stays yours.

Range is physics

Bluetooth Low Energy typically carries a few tens of metres. Beyond that a device is simply not there to be observed, however carefully the app looks.

Ordinary things look persistent

Headphones, fitness bands and car systems behave exactly like a signal that stays with you, because they do stay with you. Trusted devices exist for precisely this.

Background monitoring is not continuous

An active session shows a Live Activity, but that does not give uninterrupted Bluetooth scanning. iOS can delay detection while the screen is off, and force-quitting the app stops monitoring altogether.

Watching costs battery

Sustained monitoring draws power. Passive keeps that to a minimum; High Alert is the opposite trade, deliberately.

No access to Find My

VELREN has no access to Apple Find My and cannot read anything Apple keeps there.

Questions

Common questions

Does this prove that someone is following me?

No, and it is not built to. VELREN shows which signals recurred, in how many places and on how many days, and how well independent evidence agrees. Reading that as a conclusion is your decision, not the app’s.

Can it tell how far away a device is?

No. Signal strength is affected by walls, bodies, pockets and the device’s own transmit power, so it cannot be turned into a distance. VELREN describes how close something ever came in relative terms only.

Does it work in the background?

Partly, and it says so. An active session keeps a Live Activity going, but iOS decides how often a backgrounded app may scan, and detection can be delayed while the screen is off. Force-quitting the app ends monitoring.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no sign-up, no e-mail, no profile, and nothing to restore. The app works the moment it is installed.

Where does my data go?

Nowhere. Analysis and storage are on the device, encrypted, with the key in the Keychain. The only outbound request in the whole app is Apple Maps asking for map tiles when you open a map.

What is the difference between a perimeter capture and the observer ledger?

A capture is a deliberate imprint of one place at one moment, made by you. The ledger is what builds up on its own across sessions. A capture answers "has this signal from my car turned up elsewhere?"; the ledger answers "how often, and in how many places, have I seen this signal at all?"

Why is a high rank in the ledger not an accusation?

Because recurrence is ordinary. Colleagues, neighbours, couriers and the bus you take every day all recur by definition. The rank measures how consistently something appears around you, nothing more. It turns into a warning only when you decide the signal is worth watching.

Will it detect any tracker?

No. VELREN recognises the advertisement patterns of common tracker hardware, but a device that stays silent, uses an unknown pattern or sits out of Bluetooth range cannot be observed at all.