All of us have that one nosy friend who sneaks into the Messages app
the moment they get your device and reads all your conversations. If you
hate this, you might want to check out a new jailbreak tweak known as ‘ConvoProtect’ that adds an extra layer of security to your conversations.
ConvoProtect allows you to lock as well as hide select conversations
from the stock Messages app, including Whatsapp and Kik as well. Along
with individual conversations, the tweak also provides an option to
secure group messages as well as hide the message preview for a
particular conversation in the conversations list.
Once you install the tweak, a preferences pane will be added to the
Settings app dedicated to ConvoProtect. Here, you’ll find a bunch of
configurations to mess around with but the most important ones are the
sections dedicated to locking and hiding a conversation. Under the
“Normal” section, you get to choose which conversations you want to lock
in either Messages, Whatsapp or Kik by adding the contacts to the list.
Once you’ve added the contacts, simply type in the password and press
“Save”.
Similarly, under the “Groups” section, you can lock a group by
entering the group’s name. When someone tries to enter a locked
conversation, they will be prompted to enter the password to gain
access. On the other hand, if you want to completely unlock a
conversation (no more password-protected), you’ll have to remove the
contact from the “Locked Numbers” or “Locked Groups” list in the tweak’s
preferences pane.
If you don’t want to lock a particular conversation, you can also
choose to hide it. To do so, you’ll first have to enable the hide option
by scrolling to the “Hide Settings” section and toggle “Hidden” to on.
Next, scroll to either “Hide Normal” or “Hide Groups” section to add the
contact or the group’s name whose conversations you want to hide. Once a
conversation is hidden, no one will be able to read it as it won’t
appear in the conversations list. Though, the good thing is that you’ll
still continue to receive new message notifications even when the
conversation is hidden. To unhide it, you can switch the “Hidden” toggle
back to off (unhides all conversations) or remove the contact from the
“Hidden Convos” list in the tweak’s preferences. You can also set an
Activator gesture to hide/unhide conversations.
Other than hiding or locking conversations, you can choose whether
you want to hide the message preview in the conversations list for all,
locked or neither conversations. Interestingly, once you’ve made the
configurations, you do not need to respring your device or close the
stock Messages, Whatsapp or Kik app for the changes to take place.
Simply open an app and you’ll notice the changes.
If you’re worried that someone might be smart enough to configure the
tweak’s settings, you can set a master password and prevent
unauthorized access to ConvoProtect’s preferences.
ConvoProtect is a tweak that comes in handy in many situations and
it works flawlessly as advertised. If you’re interested to give it a
try, you can purchase it from Cydia’s BigBoss repository for $1.99.
