How to Spy on Your Own Phone (and Why You Need It)
Do you suspect that your partner is spying on your phone? This is a serious accusation, and confronting them without evidence is a risky path. If you find yourself in a situation where you think your partner (or someone else in the house) is looking at your iPhone or Android while you sleep, there’s a built-in tool that can help confirm or disprove your suspicions.
This tip came to us from Reddit user georgewastaken3 . Their post was about the iPhone, but the same steps can be applied to Android as well. Whatever smartphone you have, its built-in usage history will tell you who snooped there. On iPhone, evidence will be recorded in either the battery summary or Screen Time, while on Android it will be recorded in Digital Wellness.
All three features track your phone’s usage throughout the day and let you know which apps and services were used when. These tools are usually useful when you’re trying to cut down on screen time or limit the impact phone usage has on battery life. However, they can also let you know if any activity is being recorded while you are not using your phone.
It’s not that any activity means you’ve been compromised: sometimes apps launch when you’re not using them, for both innocent and innocuous reasons. Your email client might have background activity because it’s looking for new messages even when the app isn’t open, while Facebook might be logging background activity because it’s a data leech.
What you want to pay attention to are the specific activities that happen while you are sleeping or not on the phone that you know you didn’t do yourself. If you see Messages or Gmail open for 20 minutes at 2am (not background activity, mind you), that’s a red flag. The same goes for any app on your phone that you weren’t using at the time.
For example, in the battery status summary on my iPhone, I can tap the battery level graph to see which apps were used at what time. Between 1 and 2 am, four apps were active, all running in the background. It’s actually quite interesting to see how much Photos activity takes up in the background overnight – the app is hard at work, probably syncing with iCloud.
However, if I saw the photos active without the background tag, I might conclude that someone is viewing my photos in the middle of the night. Not cool.
Again, be careful when making accusations. If your partner is indeed spying on you while you sleep, that’s a big red flag. Of course, not all covert activity is malicious. Maybe your child stole your phone to play Minecraft at midnight.