The Three Best Apps To Catch A Person Who Has Tried To Unlock Your Phone

The Three Best Apps To Catch A Person Who Has Tried To Unlock Your Phone

We all remember the days when apps used to give us only the ability to track our stolen mobiles. There were several apps which would tell us the exact location of our mobiles when they went missing. This also helped us to recover our mobiles and sometimes zero in on the culprits.

However, in today’s fast-paced world, we have come to a stage when we store some of the most important documents in our mobiles. We like to have everything on our fingertips. Be it our medical records, business or legal documents, we store them in our mobiles. Our phones have in fact become a repository to a lot of very sensitive data.

Some of our most cherished memories reside in our mobiles in the form of images of our near and dear ones. To protect these documents, it has become mandatory to monitor our mobiles 24X7. The latest buzzword in the market are the apps that actually click an image of anyone who makes an attempt to break into our phones by trying to unlock it.

What I am about to say might sound controversial, but sometimes we need to protect our mobiles from even our near and dear ones. For all, you know your adolescent son or daughter might be making attempts to get access to your phone. I understand we all love and trust our children and they are very dear to us, but still we need to keep track of everyone, sometimes for their own good.

In this article, I plan to review three applications that actually capture images of people who try to unlock our phones and fail. The first of these apps is called ‘Who Unlocked My Phone’.

Who Unlocked My Phone:

I downloaded this app from Google’s Play Store and here are the opening screens that greeted me. The first screen looks like this.

 I labored on to the second screen.

You have to provide the app access to your photos, media and files. The next screen looks like this.

You will have to provide the app permission to take pictures. Then comes the email setup. You can set the app such that you receive an email whenever someone tries to unlock your phone illegally.

And here is the final step. You have to provide the app administrator rights.

For setting up the app to do its job you will have to set the home screen to START.

Simply go ahead and click on the button marked START. And you will get the following screen.

Now close the application and you are all set. Close the phone and make a couple of attempts to unlock it by providing the wrong pattern or password. And then give the correct one and unlock the phone and here is what you will see in the notifications list.

The app immediately tells me there have been two attempts to unlock my phone along with the date and time. And when I opened the app, I found it captures a reasonably good image. 

The images of the intruder are clear enough to identify the person in case you already know him or her. In this case, the images are of yours truly. But I would have expected a full image of my face. As it is, the images only show the top half of my face. But in any case, it seems to be reasonably good unless you are trying to pass it off as evidence in a court of law!

This led me to the second app in the list of apps I am reviewing. The name of this app is ‘Lockwatch: Thief Catcher’.

Lockwatch: Thief Catcher:

As in the previous app, Lockwatch also asks for several permissions. Here are the screenshots.

The thing I noticed about the Lockwatch app is that the images are sent to your email id alone. You need to set it up that way. When I checked my inbox after a couple of illegal attempts to unlock my phone, I did receive an email from Lockwatch about the intrusions. I also found that the quality of the image was good and the location map was accurate. Here is a screenshot of the the email I received.

You get a complete image of the face, unlike the earlier app I described. You also get to view the location of the mobile. This is a great improvement on the previous app in which the image could provide only half the face of the intruder. So, this app, I feel, is definitely better than the earlier one.

The third app for catching intruders I am going to review is ‘Third Eye’.

Third Eye:

The modus operandi seems to be the same. Screens that ask for permission come first. The app asks for permission for accessing contacts, media, photos, contacts and so on. 

No need to start or stop anything like the first app. Just close the application and make a couple of incorrect attempts to unlock your phone. Finally, when you unlock correctly and open the app you will get an image of the person who made the attempts to intrude.

The quality of the image is not as good as the one we got with the Lockwatch app. But the face in the image is pretty clear and identifiable. After examining all three apps, I would conclude that the best of the three is the Lockwatch app. I am making this statement based solely on the quality of the images of the intruder rendered by the apps.

I guess for an app that guards your phone the image of the intruder is of utmost importance. Third Eye which provides a reasonably good image quality, stands second in the rating. And the one I rate last is Who Unlocked My Phone which shows only half my face in the image. I tried it repeatedly but I could not get a full image of my face.

Thanks for reading this article and I hope you got an answer to the question regarding what app to use if you want to figure out who is trying to fool around with your mobile.