CyanogenMod has to be one of the biggest and most popular projects that people think of when they hear “Custom ROM”. For those unfamiliar with CyanogenMod, it’s a fresh version of Android – totally compatible with the Play Store and other apps – that’s built from the same source code that Google open sources as part of the Android Open Source Project. When it started life as just a way of getting a little more out of Android, CyanogenMod was nothing like the project it is today, and since then it’s grown cornerstone features that we know to be from CyanogenMod and it continues to improve on the original blueprint that Google ships every year. In a new feature being teased, CyanogenMod could be set to get some new security features, locked apps away.
A few days ago, a post was shared by the official CyanogenMod Google+ account showing off some “rewritten” code from the protected apps implementation. The new code allows for more nuanced and system-wide portection of selected apps. In the example, CyanogenMod developer Adnan Begovic shows off a folder called “Monies” which locked all of his banking apps behind a pattern code. He then added the Google Play Store to this folder of apps. When inside of Google Chrome, the user tried to launch the Google Play Store, but CM13 wouldn’t let him until he unlocked the app with his pattern. Fingerprint authentication can be used as well, should your device support it in CM13, writes Begovic.
This is a pretty great way of implementing such a feature, and even though there are apps available in the Play Store that can do this, having a system-wide, system-level solution will be much more secure. It’s interesting to see CyanogenMod introduce new features, and this one will be coming to CM13 in presumably very soon, in the form of nightly releases. Whether or not this makes its way into Cyanogen OS that ships on devices the world over is unclear, but we’d like to assume so. Users interested can take a look at the video below and comment on the Google+ post by clicking the source link.