Nowadays, smartphones have become the storehouse of our personal information. It holds a lot of personal information that is potentially accessible to prying eyes. Hence, it is important to lock your phone to prevent other from accessing it.
If you use an Android phone, you can set a screen lock to lock your whole phone. This is the easiest way to protect and secure your Android phone. While that serves the purpose in most cases, it’s no use when you hand over your phone to someone to make a call or look up something on the Internet. For any reason, if you unlock the phone once, access to each application and information is unlocked. That’s means your private data are at risk.
If you are in such a situation and want to make sure that the important files on your Android device are secure, then you can use a third-party app called Hexlock to lock any app or folder that you don’t want others to see.
Hexlock is a security app that manages to protect and secure your personal data by locking your individual apps instead of your whole phone. The app allows you to lock any installed and pre-installed apps on your device via PIN or pattern lock.
Hexlock comes with 6 different profiles that allow you to lock selected apps in each profile and switch the profiles depending on your current location and what situation you are in. The six standard profiles are Work, Home, Parental, School, Party and Cafe. You can also change the name and color of each profile as you want.
How to Use Hexlock
To get started, download and install Hexlock that is available for free on the Google Play Store. Once installed, launch it. When you first launch the Hexlock app, you’ll be asked to choose between a PIN code or a pattern – select the one that you’re most comfortable with. Enter and confirm your PIN or pattern.
After configuring it, you will be taken to the profile page from where you can choose the apps that you want to lock. To lock apps, tap on ‘Start Locking Apps’ at the bottom of the chosen profile and you will see a list of all the apps installed in your smartphone. Simply toggle the switches next to the apps you want to protect from the App list.
To activate the profile, you just have to tap on the profile icon once and the locks will beactivated. Now whenever someone opens any of these protected apps, they will have to enter the PIN/Pattern that you’ve set in the beginning. The notification panel will also show you the active profile along with the number of locked apps in the panel.
In case you want to make all apps accessible, just swipe to left until you see the ‘Off’ profile icon, and tap on it. This will deactivates the app locks, making all applications accessible for everyone.
You can also prevent anyone else to uninstall this app in order to access your apps. To do so, go to the app’s default settings menu and enable the ‘Uninstall prevention’ option. Onceactivated, if anyone tries to uninstall Hexlock app, they will they will need to enter the PIN/pattern that you’ve created.
The interesting feature of the app is that it can automatically switch profile when it detects a known Wi-Fi connection. For example, when you connect to home WiFi network, it changes to Home profile, and when you are at work, it changes to your Work profile. This feature can be found in the app setting menu.
If you happen to forget your PIN or pattern, simply tap the three dots on the top right and tap on ‘Forgot your password?’ to retrieve your access.
Conclusion
Hexlock is an extremely useful and easy-to-use app locker for Android that lets users to create different lock profiles for different locations or circumstances. If you’re looking for a smart way to protect apps on your Android device, then Hexlock is definitely the best choice for you.
