We often come across situations where we let others use our personal devices. These are usually when we are meeting friends and family and take a bunch of pictures/videos or show them a couple of funny videos we’ve found on the internet. More often than not, we start feeling a little uneasy when we can’t see what the other person is looking at on our devices. There may also be cases where you are constantly receiving notifications that you do not want the other person to see (Tinder anyone?).
I was thinking about lock screens on smart phones can be extended to support profile switching. You could assign different device settings (profiles) to different codes or patterns. When you enter a code or pattern, it would unlock the device and changes the device settings to that particular profile.
A basic profile could have the following features:
- Hide certain applications
- Use a different default launcher (Android)
- Mute notifications
- Change brightness/sound settings
- Change wallpaper
A incognito profile would be:
- Muted notifications
- Social media applications hidden
- Gallery related applications hidden
- etc.
I would love to work on something like this but unfortunately, iOS does not allow custom lock screen applications and most custom lock screen implementations are shabby on Android devices (eg. 2 lock-screens could successively come up on certain devices) due to fragmentation.