Google Pixel could finally add a feature that every other Android phone has

A personal smartphone is an extension of you, which means there are a lot of things you don’t want anyone to see when they borrow your phone. You might not want a stranger opening your gallery or tampering with your messaging apps, and you definitely won’t want anyone to have access to your digital bank account or e-wallet. Fortunately, most phones offer ways to combat this problem and protect the privacy of your most confidential apps. Unfortunately, Pixel phones aren’t one of them – something that may be about to change.

Google has been teasing this feature for a while, and while the Canary 2603 developer build for the latest OS update had a test version of this feature, it wasn’t part of the new features coming with Android 17. This already shows that the company is working on it, but we have additional confirmation from Android Authority, which noticed new beta builds for Android 17 containing strings indicating how app lock will work on Google Pixel phones.

We still don’t know when this feature will be available to consumers, but there are a few interesting things to note. First, the feature works more like the native App Lock on OnePlus phones than Samsung’s Secure Folder: each app is locked independently rather than being placed in an isolated space on your phone. It has also been reported that users will be able to completely remove PINs and passwords, making biometric verification the only way to access locked apps.

While it’s not a true dedicated app lock – and it’s certainly much less convenient than one – Google offers a similar feature with Private Space, which you can access from your Pixel’s Settings. Instead of locking specific apps behind a password, this hidden Google Pixel feature creates a second, locked interface inside your phone. You can set a password for this and then download apps from this interface, and you can only access them by entering the password.

To do this, open the Settings app on any Google Pixel smartphone released after the Pixel 5. Scroll down until you find Security & Privacy, tap it, then scroll down and tap Privacy. You’ll need to add a new Google account to manage this space, then reinstall any apps you want. Additionally, if you don’t want other people to access an app normally, you’ll need to delete it from your phone outside of Private Space, because the version of an app you install in Private Space is separate from the one you normally install.

This feature does everything an app lock does, but differs significantly. It’s not as easy to set up or as quick to use. You can’t just tap an app on your home screen and then access it after entering a password. Instead, you must first open Private Space, enter the password, and then access the app. You also can’t access data from Private Space apps when you normally use your phone, nor can you receive notifications.

Pixel users finally have hope of getting this feature, but we still don’t know when it will be available. In the meantime, there are some handy alternatives to app lock that you can use while you wait for Google to finalize the feature and make it available.

First, many apps offer built-in encryption even if your phone doesn’t natively support app lock. This applies to messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram; financial apps like PayPal, e-wallets and official banking apps; and cloud storage applications that may contain sensitive information. How to do this varies depending on what you’re using, but a label like App Lock can be found in the Privacy or Security tabs of Settings. You can also use a third-party app to add app lock features to your phone. These are sufficient for most uses, but will ultimately not offer the same system-level implementation as a native app lock. You can download many of them from the Play Store by searching for “app lock”, and most antivirus apps, such as BitDefender or AVG, come with it as well.

Some apps also let you lock specific data with a password, including the Files by Google app that comes by default on your Pixel phone. To enable and use this feature, scroll to Collections, then tap Secure Folder. You can then set a password for this, move all the confidential files here, and you will no longer be able to see or access them anywhere else on the phone without the password you set.