Find Out When Other Apps Are Using Your Microphone or Camera With This Android App
One of my favorite tiny features in Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 operating system – critical to privacy and security – is a rare double feature. Whenever the app accesses your camera or microphone, you’ll see a tiny colored dot in the upper right corner of the screen, just above the bars, indicating the signal strength for your Wi-Fi or cellular connection. Android devices don’t have this feature out of the box, but one small app can fix it.
Before we get to that, here’s what the feature looks like on iOS 14. (A green dot means the app is using your front or rear camera; an orange dot means the app is using your microphone).
As mentioned, you won’t find such a feature on your Android (at least at the time of this posting). However, you can get this functionality by downloading and installing a simple app from the Google Play Store: Access Dots . It’s free, simple, and helps to improve the security of your Android device. I would almost call it a must-have for everyone because it is unobtrusive and useful.
Download and run the app and you will see one simple setting that needs to be enabled. That’s all you need to do to activate the basic functionality of Access Dots.
Well, this is also clicking on the new “Access Points” list in the accessibility settings, and then turning on the service there.
Go back to the Android home screen and … you won’t see anything. Zilch. That’s just the point. However, open the Camera app and you will see a large green icon in the upper right corner of your device. Click on the microphone icon of your Google Assistant and you will see an orange dot; the same as what iOS 14 users see.
If you don’t like these colors, you can change them to whatever you want in the Access Dots settings. You can even change the location of the specified point, as well as its size. Click on the little History icon in the main Access Dots user interface – you can’t miss it – and you can even view a log that shows which apps have requested access to the camera with microphone and how long they have been using it:
While I’m not a huge fan of how much ads the Access Dots app clogs up, I respect someone’s need to make some money. You only see them when you start the application. Otherwise, all you see on your phone are these dots. I would argue that this is not a terrible trade-off considering what this simple security application is capable of.