The moment we knew Hawk was more than a dashcam app

The message that changed everything

Six months into Hawk's life, we received an email from a user in London. She'd been a passenger in a car when another vehicle deliberately rammed them off the road. The driver fled. Police took a statement but had almost nothing to go on. Then she remembered: her boyfriend's phone was mounted on the dashboard, Hawk was recording.

She exported the footage using the one-tap dispute ZIP. Everything was there. The other car's registration plate, clear footage of the collision, the moment of impact. But here's what mattered: every clip carried a SHA-256 integrity hash. We'd built that feature because we knew evidence could be challenged in court. The hash proved the footage hadn't been edited or tampered with.

When the user handed that ZIP to the police, they contacted us directly. They needed to verify the evidence chain. We walked them through our process. How the hash is written to every clip in real time. How the manifest file proves which clips were recorded when. How the GPS timestamp and speed overlay are optional but, in this case, corroborated her account.

The detective wanted to understand the entire workflow. She asked harder questions than I'd prepared for. 'If I'm prosecuting someone with this, I need to know it's tamper-proof. What happens if someone deletes the app and reinstalls it? What if they try to doctor the files on their phone?' We spent an hour on the phone. By the end, she was satisfied.

Why we built it this way from the start

When we were designing Hawk in 2022, we knew dashcams were popular. But they were all hardware. Expensive. People bought them, installed them poorly, and then didn't upgrade them. We saw an opportunity: nearly everyone carries a phone that's already good at video. Why make people buy another device?

But then we asked a harder question: if we're asking someone to trust their phone as evidence, we have to be serious about it. No shortcuts. That's when the integrity hashing became non-negotiable. We weren't building a dashcam app. We were building something that could stand up in court.

The Evidence Locker came next. It uses biometric lock. Fail-closed, so if the unlock fails, the clips stay locked. We added the dispute export ZIP specifically so users could hand evidence to police or their insurer without any ambiguity about what they were looking at. A manifest file lists every clip, its hash, the date and time it was recorded, and the GPS data if the user had enabled it.

None of this was flashy. It wasn't something we could market loudly. But it was the difference between a neat app and something that mattered.

What happened in court

The detective's call came because the case had made it to prosecution. The suspect was being charged with aggravated assault. Our user was the key witness, and her Hawk footage was the key evidence.

The prosecutor's office contacted us two weeks before the trial. They wanted to understand whether the footage would hold up under cross-examination. Defence lawyers are good at their jobs. They'll attack anything that looks vulnerable. They'd argue the footage was edited, the timestamps were wrong, the GPS data was fabricated. We needed to be bulletproof.

We provided detailed documentation of how Hawk records, how the hashing works, and what the manifest file proves. We explained that the app doesn't have any advanced editing features, that clips are recorded continuously in a loop, and that the only way to 'edit' would be to delete a clip entirely (which the manifest would show as missing).

The prosecutor asked if we could testify. We thought about it. I've never been in a courtroom. Neither had anyone on our team. But this mattered. We said yes.

I'm not going to pretend I remember every detail. The stand was uncomfortable. The defence lawyer asked if the app could be hacked, if timestamps could be spoofed, if the hashing could be faked. I answered honestly: yes, anything can be attacked if someone is determined and resourced enough. But breaking SHA-256 hashing is computationally infeasible. Spoofing GPS on a phone requires the user to have enabled developer options and used specialized tools. The app logs all permissions and access. In this case, the evidence chain was clean.

The defendant was convicted. Aggravated assault. The judge noted that the video evidence was decisive. It was admissible because we'd designed the app with evidence integrity as a first-class feature, not an afterthought.

What this meant for us

That trial changed how I think about what we've built. Hawk started as a clever idea. Everyone has a phone. Why not turn it into a dashcam? That's still true. But somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking about daily commuters and rideshare drivers just protecting themselves from insurance fraud. We started thinking about people who needed evidence that would hold up.

It wasn't a pivot. The app remained the same. But the weight of it became clearer. A Hawk clip could be the difference between someone's word and the truth. Between a conviction and a suspect going free. Between an insurance company paying out and denying a claim.

We made some changes after the trial. We documented our evidence-integrity process in plain language. We made it easier for users to understand what the GPS overlay means and why the biometric lock matters. We added support for NDSP police-report submission on iOS, so officers can request footage directly without users having to meet them or email files.

We also didn't change the pricing. The Free tier still allows 10 clips a month with seven-day retention. People can start without paying anything. The Local Pro tier is £3.99 a month or a lifetime option at £49.99. For rideshare drivers, the Rideshare Pro at £8.99 a month adds the cabin camera and shift mode for multiple trips. These prices haven't changed because we wanted evidence-quality tools to be accessible, not exclusive to people willing to pay £20 a month.

A different kind of responsibility

Running a company that builds tools is one thing. Running a company that builds tools that end up in courtrooms is another. We've thought a lot about the implications. What if someone uses Hawk to record evidence of a crime they committed? What if footage is used in a way that harms someone unjustly? These aren't abstract 'terms of service' questions. They're real.

We don't monitor what people record. The app is end-to-end: it records, it stores locally on the user's device, and it only syncs Pro clips to the user's own iCloud if they choose. We're not a surveillance platform. We're not selling data. We're not storing video on our servers unless a user explicitly chooses to back up their locked evidence clips to iCloud.

What we do is make sure that when someone captures evidence, it's reliable. That's it. Everything else is up to the person holding the phone.