If you take a look at IOS 14 you may already know about the cool new privacy feature of indicating Camera and Microphone access feature, which indicate you whenever an app is using one of them with green or orange indication dot just above the iPhone’s signal meter. Where green is used to indicate camera access meanwhile orange is used to indicate microphone access.
This is a great feature for someone who thinks about privacy, especially with the fact that we here more and more news about apps stealing users data these days, and it is nice to have also within the android phones.
If you are thinking that is a useful feature you must also have in your android, this post is for you. While this hasn’t been officially supported by the Android OS yet, there are some apps you can use to enable this feature in android.
Wisom
Wisom is an app inspired by the IOS 14 privacy feature and indicates you whenever any app is accessing your camera or microphone. It needs usage access permissions to log and identify apps access to camera and microphone. and it also needs, draw over other apps permission to display the indication dot.
This app also comes with some cool customization options, you can choose any shape and color for your indicator. It also can change the position and the size of the indicator.
And this app hasn’t stopped just by indicating camera and microphone access it also logs the access of camera and microphone of each app and presents it you on the app’s home activity, where you can check for any suspicious behaviour of apps and take action.
Access Dot
Access Dot is exactly a replica of IOS privacy feature, it uses an accessibility service so of cause it needs to grant accessibility access to function properly and indicates with a green or orange indication dot just below the battery icon. It also comes with a variety of customization options including, changing the color, position and the size of the indication dot.
Access dot also has the takes the IOS privacy feature further and logs the access of every app camera and microphone use, which you can check whenever you want.
Final thought
Both of these apps are almost identical in terms of the functionalities, though there are differences in the way they access the phone, Wisom use usage access mean while the Access Dot uses the accessibility services. And also they offer slightly different options when it comes customization.
In both of these apps, indicator dot appear below the status bar, as these apps are not system implementations I think that is acceptable. However this indication is small and do not obstuct your view.
As both of these apps use background services both these apps can have little impact on the battery life of your device. In terms of the impact on battery, Wisom might be stepping ahead just a little bit as it does not use an accessibility service. And both of these apps only require around 10 MB of disk space which is not a large overhead for modern devices.
So finally it is hard to choose a one over another, try them both and stick with what is most appealing.
