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App Lock

Your device's own lock screen protects Grafida when the device is locked. App Lock protects it when the device is not — when it is unlocked, in somebody's hand, and that somebody is not you.

It is optional and off by default. You can lock the whole of Grafida, or only particular sites, or both. Everything is on the Settings screen, under App Lock.

What it protects against, and what it does not

Grafida can reach every article of every site you have connected — including the private ones and the ones that are not published yet. Your API token lives in your system's own secret store and is never shown back to you, so nobody can simply take it. But an unlocked device in the wrong hands does not need to take it: Grafida will happily spend it for them.

That is the gap App Lock closes. Somebody who picks up your unlocked phone, or sits down at your unattended desk, meets an authentication prompt instead of your articles.

It is not, and cannot be, protection against somebody who has your device and plenty of time. Anyone able to restore a backup, read the device's storage directly or reach the machine's disk can reach the same data. App Lock raises the cost of the grabbed-device moment and prevents accidental exposure. Treat it as that, not as a safe.

Locking Grafida

Turn on Lock Grafida and Grafida asks you to authenticate:

  • when you open it, and
  • when you come back to it after a minute or more spent elsewhere.

The minute is deliberate. Switching to a browser to copy a link, or to a photo app to fetch a picture, is ordinary work in the middle of writing an article, and being asked to authenticate every single time would only teach you to turn the feature off.

Locking individual sites

Every connected site has its own switch under Protected sites. A locked site asks you to authenticate before it opens, and stays open under the same one-minute rule.

The two locks are independent. Unlocking one site does not unlock another, so if you keep one sensitive client site among several ordinary ones you can protect just that one. A protected site is marked Locked in the Sites list.

When both apply, Grafida's own gate comes first: somebody who has locked Grafida and a site is not shown the site's name — which is itself information — before they have proved they may see anything at all.

Turning a lock off also asks

Switching any of these locks off asks you to authenticate first, exactly as switching it on does. That is the point: a lock that anybody holding your unlocked device could flip off in ten seconds would not be a lock at all.

Switching a lock on asks too, which confirms that authentication actually works on this device before you come to depend on it.

Biometrics, or your PIN or password — never biometrics alone

Grafida asks Android for authentication and lets it decide how. A fingerprint or face if the device has one and you have enrolled it; your PIN, pattern or password otherwise. Your device credential is always available as a fallback, and Grafida never asks for biometrics on their own.

That fallback matters more here than it might elsewhere. Local articles you have not published yet exist only on this device. If a scratched finger, a bad angle or a re-enrolled face could shut you out permanently, this feature would be more dangerous than the problem it solves.

If the device has no PIN, pattern or password at all

Then there is nothing for Grafida's gate to sit behind, and it says so instead of locking you out. The data is already reachable by anyone holding the device, so refusing to open would protect nobody while costing you access to work that exists nowhere else. Set a screen lock in your device's own settings and the locks start working.

Important

That is the only case in which the gate opens by itself. Cancelling the prompt does not open it. Failing the prompt does not open it. Neither does an authentication that could not be attempted for some other reason — "I could not check" is not the same as "there is nothing to check against", and Grafida treats it as the refusal it is.

When Grafida cannot authenticate at all

If Android reports that it cannot ask you to authenticate — biometric hardware that is locked out after too many failed attempts, for instance — the gate stays shut and Grafida shows you the platform's own explanation. Turning a lock off needs an authentication too, so a lock switched on before this happened cannot be switched off again until authentication works — which is one more reason Grafida asks you to authenticate when you turn a lock on.

Screenshots, screen recording and casting

Grafida can stop the screen being captured, and it does so while any lock is switched on. With Lock Grafida on, or with at least one site protected:

  • screenshots of Grafida are refused by the system;
  • screen recording and casting show a blank rectangle where Grafida's window is;
  • the preview tile in the recent-apps switcher is blanked, so flicking between apps during a presentation does not put somebody's unpublished article on the projector.

This is all-or-nothing: Android has one switch for the whole window, so while it is on you cannot take a screenshot of your own article either. That is why Grafida only sets it while a lock is configured — somebody who asked for no protection pays nothing for it.

Tip

To get your screenshots back, turn every lock off — the app lock and every protected site. Grafida clears the restriction the moment nothing is protected any more.

What clears a lock

  • Deleting a site removes its protection along with everything else about it.
  • Reset local storage on the Settings screen returns Grafida to a clean state, which includes turning every lock off.

Both are deliberate actions that ask for confirmation first. Nothing else forgets a lock: it survives closing Grafida, restarting the device and updating the application.