One account covers Compose, Snap and Cloud. Sotto has no account and never asks for one.
What needs an account
Snap deliberately does not gate on sign-in. Its capture shortcut has to fire from the system tray
with nobody signed in, and its library is a folder of your own image files — putting a login in
front of either would be pointless.
Signing in from a desktop app
Compose and Snap do not ask for your password. Signing in opens your browser:
Choose Sign in
In Compose this is the sign-in screen at launch. In Snap it is the account chip in the title bar.
Approve in the browser
The app shows a short code and opens mauvely.com. Confirm the code matches, and complete
sign-in there as usual — including a Google sign-in, a passkey, or your two-factor code.
Return to the app
The app polls until you have approved, then signs itself in. Nothing further is typed into the
app itself.
Managing signed-in apps
Each app appears under Devices on your account page at mauvely.com, and can be revoked from
there. Revoking takes effect the next time that app starts up.
Working offline
Requiring an account does not mean requiring a connection.
When an app cannot reach mauvely.com, it keeps working with the session it already has and says so
in the interface — Compose’s account chip reads Offline — couldn’t reach mauvely.com. This grace
period lasts 14 days from the last successful check. Past that, you need to sign in again.
If the service actively rejects your session — because you revoked it, or changed your password —
the stored session is cleared immediately rather than kept for the grace period.
Privacy of the stored session
Each app stores its session token in a single file readable only by your user account, in the
app’s own data folder. It is not encrypted and it is not held in your operating system’s keychain:
any program running as you can read it, in the same way it could read an SSH key. Storing it in a
per-platform secret store is a known improvement, not something in place today.
Compose and Snap keep separate tokens, so signing out of one does not sign out of the other.
Your Mauvely Cloud password is different
Cloud’s encryption key is derived from your account password inside your browser, and that
derivation never leaves the browser. This is why Mauvely cannot read your Cloud files even though
it holds your account.
The practical consequence: Mauvely cannot reset your way back into your files. If you forget
your password, your 24-word recovery phrase is the only other thing that opens them. See
Setting up your vault. 
