A locked phone protects you from whoever finds it on the bus. But once the phone is unlocked, everything is open: the banking app, your health records, your messages to your lawyer. With Private Space you can put the most sensitive things behind a lock of their own, in a part of the phone that is not even visible when it is closed.<\/p>\n
Private Space is a separate part of the phone with its own apps, its own files and its own lock. The feature arrived with Android 15, and on GrapheneOS, the operating system on the Matrix phone, it is fully supported.<\/p>\n
The space appears as its own section at the bottom of the app list. When it is unlocked, you use the apps as usual. When it is locked, the apps are stopped, their notifications go quiet and they disappear from the recent apps. You can also choose to hide the space completely, so that it can only be found by searching for it.<\/p>\n
Many phones offer to hide apps or lock them with a code. That is a shell on the outside. Private Space is instead a separate user running inside your normal one, with the same isolation as between two different people on the same phone.<\/p>\n
That means three things. The apps in the space are separate copies with their own data, so the same app can exist both outside and inside without sharing anything. Apps outside cannot read files, contacts or calendars in the space, and the apps inside cannot read yours. And the space has its own encryption keys. On GrapheneOS it can rest fully locked, with its keys gone from memory, while the rest of the phone is used as normal.<\/p>\n
GrapheneOS has several ways of keeping apps apart, and they suit different needs.<\/p>\n
Private Space is the most convenient. It sits in your normal app list, opens with a tap and suits what you use often but want to protect.<\/p>\n
A separate user profile is the most isolated. You switch to it as if it were another person on the phone, and it can have completely different settings. It suits what you rarely need or want to keep entirely to itself.<\/p>\n
A work profile needs a special app to manage it. GrapheneOS recommends Private Space over a work profile for isolating apps, because it is better integrated with the system.<\/p>\n
Setting up a Private Space on the Matrix phone takes a couple of minutes, and everything is done in the settings. We have made a guide with animations that shows each step.<\/p>\n