New Standard Feature - Biometric App Locking

04.03.21 05:11 PM By Craig

Whilst our stance on biometrics for locking your phone is not great – we simply do not recommend it; this does not mean biometric security is not useful.

Omerta doesn’t recommend fingerprint or facial recognition to unlock a device because it’s too easy to be physically coerced by bad actor – either whilst asleep or forcefully under duress.

Image showing security settings

Because of this we don’t recommend using biometrics to unlock you phone. However, wouldn’t biometric locking be useful to unlock Signal or WhatsApp or your Emails? Having a secondary lock on certain apps can be useful to stop prying eyes, especially if passing your phone to other people. A PIN lock is tedious in these circumstances & we recognise this.

Now on all Omerta handsets, we support secondary biometric locking so you can conveniently secure apps such as Signal with your fingerprint, without having to use your fingerprint to unlock the device.

The Titan Ultra uses facial recognition to support this feature natively, whilst other Titans require an app called AdminControl. You can download the app from F-Droid here: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.davidshewitt.admincontrol/

Setup could not be simpler:

  1. Go to Security settings and register your finger print.
  2. Leave your Screen Lock set to PIN
  3. Open the app AdminControl
  4. Check the setting Disable Fingerprint on Lock Screen.
  5. With this done you can then visit privacy settings in various apps such as Signal and enable locking.

This simple new addition makes you messages more private – if you often share your phone with others you’ll know how annoying  it is when they open your messaging apps by accident or see a notification which was for your eyes only. This solves this problem is convenient & quick fashion.