Private and secure messaging app Confide is gaining an interesting new feature that will successfully prevent its users from taking a screenshot within the app, and the team behind Confide is also planning to release the anti-screenshot technology as an SDK that can be used by other app developers.
Called ScreenShieldKit, the new SDK prevents screenshots, screen recording, QuickTime recording, Screen mirroring, Xcode screenshots, and viewing an app's contents in the App Switcher on both the iPhone and the iPad.
There is no dedicated API to stop screenshots from being taken in iOS like there is in Android, so ScreenShieldKit is using a whiteout feature instead. In an app that has ScreenShieldKit enabled, screenshots taken are a blank aside from a single status bar at the top. The same goes for recordings.
Apple does have a feature that prevents screenshots from being taken in apps that stream video content from a server, such as Netflix and iTunes, but since Confide does not stream from a server, Confide's developers tell us it took quite a bit of tweaking and work to develop ScreenShieldKit.
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The Confide team used a "collection of technologies" to get ScreenShieldKit to work, and they believe they're the first to come up with this screenshot proofing concept on iOS devices. ScreenShieldKit uses only public APIs, and no private APIs, and it's a seamless experience for end users.
The current version of the Confide confidential messaging app already protects against screenshots by revealing just one line of text at a time, but the new ScreenShield feature is being implemented into the app to provide even more robust screenshot protection.
In the Confide app, ScreenShield will make it so any screenshot captured will show no message content. Confide also already uses end-to-end encryption and erases messages after they've been viewed to provide a secure messaging platform.
While Confide's ScreenShield feature will prevent on-device screenshots, there is, of course, no way to stop people from taking a photo of an iPhone's screen with a secondary device. Still, for on-device use, it's a solid solution that many developers may be interested in adopting.
Confide is offering the ScreenShieldKit feature to developers, with more information available on the ScreenShieldKit website.
The Confide app, with ScreenShield built in, can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
if I pay $1k+ for a phone you better believe i want to be able to take a screen shot on said device.
AE
If they were okay with devs limiting screenshotting, they would have simply created an API for it. It's too easy for them.
EDIT: It seems this company has wasted its time.
Great, so an app can now keep the device owner from creating screen grabs on the device they own? I certainly hope this is completely user configurable, otherwise it is a complete fail.
I think this is marketed to developers so they can prevent the user from doing what they want. Like every other attempt to prevent "copying", this will create complexity and be defeated like all the others.