Rumskrot Archives
Hand it a 4 GB ZIP and the folder tree is there in a moment — because Archives reads the archive’s own index instead of unpacking it to find out what’s inside. Look at what’s in there with a real image viewer, then close it, and the app does its best to leave nothing behind. ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip and TAR, password-protected included.
Coming SooniPhone
Open It Without Unpacking It
ZIP, RAR incl. multi-volume, 7-Zip, TAR — read from the archive’s own index, never extracted just to look
The Whole Tree, Instantly
Folders, files and sizes straight from the index — expanding one costs nothing, because nothing was decompressed to build it
A Real Viewer, In-App
Every image in archive order — swipe end to end, pinch to zoom, filmstrip along the bottom. No hand-off to another app.
iPad
Open It Without Unpacking It
The Whole Tree, Instantly
A Real Viewer, In-App
Features
Browse First, Extract Later
The folder tree is built from the archive’s own index and header metadata. Opening an archive doesn’t decompress it, and expanding a folder costs nothing — the structure is already in memory.
Six Formats
ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip, plain TAR, and the compressed TAR variants — .tar.gz / .tgz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz.
Multi-Volume RAR
Split sets open as one archive: .part1.rar….partN.rar and the older .rar / .r00 / .r01 naming, including RAR5 archives whose headers are themselves encrypted.
Encrypted Archives
ZipCrypto and WinZip AES for ZIP, RAR’s own encryption, and 7-Zip AES-256 — including 7-Zip archives created with encrypted headers (-mhe=on), where even the file list is protected.
The Image Viewer
Every image in the archive, in archive order, swipeable end to end. Pinch to zoom, drag to pan, double-tap to jump in and back out, and a filmstrip along the bottom to move through a long set.
Smooth by Design
Neighbouring pages decode ahead of you inside a bounded memory budget, so paging stays fluid on a large set without the app ballooning.
Only Remembered If You Ask
A password is never kept unless you tick the box. If you do, it goes into the system Keychain on that device only — keyed to the archive’s contents rather than its name, never synced to iCloud, never written into a file. Leave the box alone and the app forgets it the moment you close the archive.
Export When You Mean To
Send a single entry, or the whole archive, to Files — always as an explicit action, never a side effect of browsing. Live progress, cancellation, and sane handling when a name already exists at the destination.
Nothing Left Lying Around
Decompressed bytes stay in memory when they fit. An entry too large for that goes to a scratch file that is protected at rest, excluded from backups, tracked in a ledger, and deleted when the operation ends.
Swept at Launch
If the app is force-quit or crashes mid-extraction, the leftovers are swept before it becomes usable again — the sweep runs ahead of the first screen, not lazily afterwards.
Built Into the System
Open In from Files without copying the archive into the app’s own sandbox first, and Share Sheet import from Mail, Messages, Safari, and anywhere else that hands off a file.
App Intents Everywhere
Open, export entry, and export all are AppIntents — so they work from Shortcuts and Siri, not just from the app’s own buttons.
Private by Construction
No network code of any kind. No backend, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts, no ads. Everything happens on your device.
About
Archives is built around three things: speed, a preview worth using, and leaving as little behind as we can manage.
Speed, because it reads the archive’s index rather than unpacking it — a 4 GB ZIP of holiday photos opens as fast as a 4 MB one, and expanding a folder is instant. The preview, because tapping a photo should give you a proper viewer — swipeable, zoomable, with a filmstrip — not a hand-off to whatever else happens to be installed.
And the last one is the part that shapes the rest. It isn’t a setting you turn on; it’s why extraction is built the way it is. Open a sensitive encrypted report and read it on your device. Browse the source tarball from a secure internal product. Type the password once, look at what you came for, close the archive — and Archives does its best to leave nothing about it behind: no unpacked copy, no password unless you asked it to keep one, and any scratch file an extraction needed deleted the moment it ends, then swept again at the next launch.
We won’t claim more than we can stand behind. No app can promise what the operating system does with a file once it has touched one, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. What we can say is that everything under the app’s own control is designed to leave nothing lying around, and that we treat a leftover as a bug rather than a detail.
Archives is the cargo hold of the Rumskrot toolbelt: Rumskrot Beacon for network probes, Rumskrot Pulse for Bluetooth LE, Rumskrot Nearfield for NFC, Rumskrot Terminal for SSH, and Rumskrot Remote for remote desktop.
No ads. No tracking. No subscription.