Not sure if this is the correct place to post, but I just wanna kinda rant a bit.
I’m not the only one that hates this, right?
An app can just do a “This App Does Not Allow Screenshots”? Like… wtf?
Like, its my phone, and some app can just decide to disable a fuction of my phone. It’s my phone and if I wanna take a screenshot, I’m taking a screenshot. I don’t care about whatever “security” the app developer wants.
Imagine if every online shopping app whether fast food or amazon, just used this to block you from taking a screenshot so you can’t save the records in case of a dispute.
Which android developer thought it was a good idea to let an app disable a function on your phone. Even iPhone doesn’t have this stupid concept.
Sorry for the rant.
Anyone wanna share your stories?
(P.S. I have a cheap secondary phone to take photos of the screen. “This App Does Not Allow Screenshots” my ass lmao, I’m taking the screenshot whether the app wants it or not.
The point of many of android’s “protection” features isn’t to protect the user from apps, but to protect apps from the user. I hate it.
In this case, I think it’s protecting apps from other apps. No secret screen recording going on while you’re looking at bank statements, etc. I find that annoying, too, but I’m less annoyed by the reasoning in this case.
Now if Google could explain why toggling wifi through Tasker requires root, I would LOVE to hear the reasoning…
Or changing or just adding a system font.
Or setting a charge capacity limit.
Or adding separate quick access tikes for wifi and cellular.
The first two don’t bug me but dam, give me my 6 buttons back!! I hate these fat notification tray icons. And yes, fuck Google for making it take MORE clicks to toggle wifi/cellular than before.
I work for a company that builds an app /sdk that handles credit cards / payments. It’s one of the (many) requirements for getting an industry standard certification (like PCIDSS / MPOC). The app Must block screenshots, and Must disable the camera while using it…
Why did you capitalize “must”?
Probably a nod to the written style of RFC definitions, which have the word entirely in capital letters, as in… the implementation MUST do such and such, and SHOULD do this other thing. In this case, the relevant security standard(s)
We have italics and bold characters for that.
RFCs were being written back when line printers couldn’t do either.
I misread your comment and thought you said “RFK”. I have no idea what an “RFC” is. Some sort of teletype thing?
RFCs are Requests For Comment, published technical documents describing proposed standards.
What on earth are those in charge of certification standards thinking they’ll achieve with requirements like this?
It’s probably to stop third party apps from screenshoting the banking app.
Why is this only a problem on mobile? Why doesn’t desktop have similar requirements?
tbh the security settings on desktop devices tend to be more lax in general; for example almost any desktop pc has an open bootloader, means you can sideload an operating system from usb. The consequence is that no password-at-login will protect your private data; only full disk encryption can.
Smartphones on the other hand often have a fully-locked bootloader, which means it’s totally non-trivial to install an alternative operating system. especially, it often contains wiping any data on the smartphone, so an attacker with access to the device can’t simply install their own OS and read the internal storage.
The same functionality that you use to take screenshots can be hijacked by bad actors to get access to your stuff. It’s especially bad if they can see your MFA apps or other sensitive info.
Not saying the functionality is always used for the best of intentions, but there are many situations where I see it as necessary.
Yes, it’s simple, if you don’t want me to screenshot your software then don’t display it on my screen.
they don’t want malware to screenshot your banking info, but go off I guess
I can log into the account on a browser with no such restriction, so it’s not protecting much.
The security argument is a lie, I think. I think websites like Netflix like these features so it’s difficult to approach copying a video.
If security were an issue I don’t think you’d be able to copy text to the clipboard in situations where you can’t screenshot.
Microsoft teams limits your clipboard to 500 characters when you try to copy on the app. Of course blocks screenshots too. If I’m on a meeting that isn’t being recorded, I now have no way of saving any pertinent information, and the ones that ARE recorded get automatically deleted after 30 days. 🤷🏽♀️
30 days is set by your company. Ours is set to 90 days. Stupid, on my opinion. If I recorded it, I obviously want to keep it. For this reason, I user OBS on my computer and record meetings through that. Bypass teams’s recording framework altogether.
OBS?
Open Broadcast Software
Open-Source screen recording and streaming software
Ah, ty.
iPhone absolutely has this concept
Interesting, I never seen an app in iOS that can block screenshots.
You can hit “take screenshot” but it results in a black frame iirc. Same for screen record.
fucking scrcpy
If only that didn’t require a PC - like an Android version that could run on your tablet to copy your phone’s screen.
Many phones can work in usb host mode. I’ll see if such a rooted phone can be used to capture screen over adb with perhaps a modified scrcpy. Or run normal scrcpy in a freedesktop rootfs container. Sounds like a fun side project.
When I first was researching scrcpy, I found a thread (probably under “issues” on the GitHub repository for scrcpy) where someone else requested the same. They then went on to create a prototype using Java that the author of scrcpy seemed impressed with, but that was as far as it went. The prototype was based on a very old version (1.x) of scrcpy, so I never bothered trying it. Might be usable for this purpose, however.
You can root your phone to remove all security features, if you don’t mind malware having full access to your data. You should probably cancel your debit and credit cards if you do, and lock your credit score, cause if you’re doing stuff like that you won’t have to wait long till Have I Been Pwned notifies you you’re in a data breach.
Rooting doesn’t automatically give root permissions to just any app that wants it - you still have to allow it.
I like that it’s possible, but I think it should be treated like a permission with a user accessible toggle in settings for each app.
I would like to see the same thing for clipboard read access. In the same way app has to prompt you for location permission it would have to prompt you to read the clipboard and you would actually have the option to allow it all the time which is handy for some apps like clipboard manager, or don’t allow it alltogether which is handy for some random apps you don’t trust.
It’s a really good feature imo and I’d love to see it be more common. This is how iOS does it:
You can bypass this crap, but you’ll need to root your phone to achieve that.
Afterwards you’ll need to install magisk (superuser app) and a bunch of plugins: play integrity fix and playcurl_next (to simulate that your phone is unrooted), and then FlagSecurePatcher (which is the actual module that’s overriding the screenshot block.
Thank you, I needed this info for a friend
If you root your phone, you give root access to any malware you run across as well. So don’t use your phone for anything that you don’t want to end up on some darkweb forum.
Rooting doesn’t automatically give root permissions to just any app that wants it - you still have to allow it.
