You do not want the person to whom you lend your smartphone to access certain applications? To preserve your privacy, hide sensitive apps that you don’t want to be visible to everyone.
Your smartphone contains a good part of your public life… and private! Banking or payment apps, social networks, private chat or dating apps… all these tools you use are within sight and at your fingertips. However, if you lend your smartphone to a child, a relative, a friend or a colleague, even for a few minutes, he has free rein to search the list of applications you have and even open them if they are not locked. by a password and thus pierce all your secrets. Your privacy takes a big hit!
To avoid this phenomenon, some Android smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo or OnePlus offer in their software overlay a setting to hide applications. They will no longer be visible on the home screen or in the app drawer. And it will, in general, enter a password to reveal their presence. For all other smartphones that do not offer this subtlety, it will be necessary to install an application precisely designed to hide others. There are several, but many of them require unwarranted permissions. So we set our sights on App Hider, a free app (with some advertising) but which is less curious than the others.
Samsung’s One UI overlay allows you to hide an application in seconds. Better, it also offers a secure folder, locked by password to store the most sensitive apps.
Simply hide apps
► Make a long press on a blank area of the home screen. From the menu that appears, choose Settingsat the bottom of the screen.
► Scroll the content of the page and press Hide apps on Home screen and Apps screen?.
► Check the box of the applications you wish to hide then confirm with OKat the bottom of the screen, when your choice is made.
► The selected apps have disappeared from the home screen and from the app drawer which contains all the apps installed on the smartphone. To find your app, open the app drawer and enter its name in the search field. Then tap on their name that appears below.
► This is not the app that opens, but the Android settings window for this app. Now press Open, at the bottom of the screen to launch it. The app launches normally.
Lock access to an app
► To limit access to apps or files, One UI offers a secure folder locked by a password. To use it, you need a Samsung account (free). Access to Settings from Android and press Security and privacy.
► Scroll down the page content and choose Secure Folder.
► On the page that appears, tap Continue. Indicate the email used for your Samsung account (you can also create one if you do not have one yet). After you provide your account and authenticate, the Secure Folder is created on your device.
► You are then prompted to choose the method for unlocking the folder (PIN code, fingerprint, password, etc.). Once you have made your choice, press Following.
► Samsung offers by default to integrate various “duplicate” apps into your Secure Folder: Camera, Calendar, Gallery, Notes, etc. Files recorded with these duplicate apps will not be mixed with the app, which will remain freely accessible. To add a new app to Secure Folder, tap the button +.
► Choose your app and press Add, at the bottom of the screen. The app immediately joins Secure Folder. You will need to reconfigure it to use it and then, if everything works normally, you can delete the version still present in your classic applications folder.
► To launch it, simply open the secure folder from the app drawer and enter the defined password.
The version of Android or the software overlay present on your mobile does not offer a function to hide applications? Use the free app App Hider which allows you to hide and lock access to the apps of your choice by password.
► Start by installing App Hider on your smartphone and give it permission to send you notifications.
Download App Hider for Android
► Then press keep on going. The app then requests access to your location and then to the device’s multimedia folder.
► App Hider is now operational. Push the button + placed at the bottom of the screen, in the center.
► Choose the app you want to hide then press Import (Hide/Dual).
► The app is now nested in App Hider. Launch it to check that it works perfectly by pressing it and then choosing Launch Dual. If so, you can then uninstall it from your app drawer.
► It’s time to lock access to your apps. Press on the toothed wheel of App Hider placed at the bottom of the screen. In the page that appears, toggle the switch AppHider Protection in active mode.
► Enter a six-digit PIN code and confirm it. The app closes immediately after entering this password.
► Clever, App Hider takes the appearance of an ordinary calculator to be discreet among the apps installed on your smartphone. Open the app drawer and look for App Hider’s calculator icon (the one with keys + And x on a black background). Press it.
► App Hider is a real calculator. Its interface looks exactly like it and it can perform basic operations. However, if you enter the previously defined PIN code, you access the hidden apps space.
