BlackBerry’s clever new Android app keeps people from peeping at your screen

There are lots of times when people around us can see what’s on our phone screens, and that can make it tricky to read confidential texts or emails. Thankfully, BlackBerry has a smart solution to that problem for Android users.

Its new Privacy Shade app lets you black out your screen, save for a rectangular or circular area that you can resize and move around. While it’s activated, you can use your phone as normal to navigate to apps and individual messages. You can turn it on or off from a persistent notification or by tapping a dedicated Quick Settings tile.

As Android Police notes, this is also pretty handy for reading in bed without pointing a fully lit screen at yourself or your partner.

Privacy Shade is only available for BlackBerry devices from Google Play and APKMirror. But there’s a simple workaround: simply grab the BlackBerry Manager APK from this page, install it on your device and then download Privacy Shade through that app (H/T P. Sherman for the tip).

Via Android Police