If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to give your smartphone to someone else, it’s an issue of trust if you don’t trust this person you are always concerned. Maybe that person is snooping into a specific app.
In this article I am going to give you ways you can prevent this from happening. For android users there are some amazing apps that can take a selfie of a person who is trying to unlock your smartphone.
Sadly, I could not find a working app for iPhone that does just that. So I created and iPhone shortcut which pretty much does the same thing.
Due to iPhone restriction it does not work on the main lock screen of iPhone. But you can still use it to prevent content from a specific app by applying this shortcut.
For example you don’t want anyone to snake into your photos app on your iPhone you can use this shortcut to get triggered whenever the photos app is open. The shortcut will ask for a password to give access to photos app.
If the person is not able to enter the right password, not only the shortcut will lock your iPhone, it will also take a photograph of that person from the front camera of your iPhone. How cool is that?
Let’s see how you can create the shortcut
To make this shortcut run when an app is opened, you need to select a trigger. IPhone shortcut offers different figures in the Automation tab.
Add the ‘App Open’ trigger
Open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone and go to the ‘Automation‘ tab. Here you will find a lot of triggers. Select the ‘App‘ open trigger to activate the shortcut.
Choose the app you want to secure, in this case, the ‘Photos‘ app and then on the next page you will have to select actions that will be performed after ‘App open‘ is triggered.
Select blank and then you can add actions into the shortcut. Below is a screenshot of my shortcut app if you are a visual person, or continue reading the article to learn what actions are added.
Add Action to the Shortcut
The first action would be,’Go to Home Screen‘ which will prevent your content from being viewed.
The next action would be ‘Ask for Input‘. We will be using this action for asking for a password. Tap on text and select ‘Number’
The third action would be ‘If’ condition. You can set the condition to match the Provided input to a particular number (5050 in this case). It will be the password.
Add the Next action, which would happen if the conditions are met (meaning, the password is correct). Add action ‘Open app‘, and select ‘Photos‘ app.
Add another action ‘Wait’. It will prevent a loop because if the Photos app is opened, the shortcut will again get triggered and this will create a loop. To prevent that, we are adding ‘Wait’ action and set 60 seconds.
Now, in the ‘Otherwise‘ section of the ‘If‘ condition action, add actions which will happen if the conditions are not met, (meaning, the password is not entered correctly).
Add action ‘Take Photo‘ and select the ‘Front‘ camera. Make sure you ‘Disable Preview’.
Add action ‘Save Photo‘. By default the photo get saved in ‘Recent‘, but if you want to keep it organised you can create an Album in Photos app called ‘Intruder Selfie‘ (or something descriptive).
Add another action ‘Lock the screen‘. Tap on Done.
You can test the Shortcut. When you open the Photos app, it will prompt for a password and if you don’t enter the right password, the shortcut will take a selfie and save it in the Photos app.
You can prevent not only Photos app, but any app on your iPhone. You can create multiple automations for individual apps. The process would be pretty much the same.
Watch the Video Tutorial
I just love the flexibility of the iPhone Shortcut app. It’s a super app where you can create as many you want check out more iPhone Shortcuts
