How to spy on your smartphone (and why you should)

Finding out if someone is using your smartphone without your knowledge is quite simple. Just use the built-in features of iOS and Android.

Do you feel like your partner is looking at your phone? This is a serious accusation, and confronting another without proof is very risky. If you find yourself in this situation, having the feeling that someone is looking at your smartphone, iPhone or Android, for example, while you sleep, know that there are tools to find out for sure.

Finding out if someone is using your smartphone without your knowledge is quite simple.

This trick is revealed by Reddit user georgewastaken3. The post is for iPhone, but the same method can be applied to Android as well. Regardless of the smartphone, the built-in usage history feature will let you know if someone has done something. On iPhone, these activities are recorded in the Battery or Screen Time summary, and on Android, in Digital Wellbeing.

These three features track your phone’s usage throughout the day and record when apps or services are used. These tools are useful when you’re trying to limit screen time, or more generally the impact phone use has on battery life. However, they can also tell you if any activities were recorded while you were not using your phone.

However, not all actions mean that your device is compromised: applications sometimes work when you are not using your phone, by the way, for innocent reasons or not. Your email client may be running in the background as it checks for new messages even when the application is not open. Facebook can also run in the background to send all of your activity to Menlo Park’s servers.

Just use the built-in features of iOS and Android

Here you should look for specific activities that happened at a time when you did not have a phone. If you see Messages or Gmail open for 20 minutes at 2am (and it’s not background activity), that’s a clear warning sign. The same goes for any app on your phone that you know you weren’t using at the time.

For example, in the battery level summary on my iPhone, I can click on the battery level graph to see which apps were in use at what time. Between 1 and 2 am, 4 apps were active and all of them were running in the background. And it’s interesting to see what kind of activity the Photos app has in the background, like at night. It’s most likely busy syncing your photos and videos to iCloud.

If, on the other hand, Photos were active without the “background”tag, I could assume that someone was viewing my photos in the middle of the night. Not cool.

Again, be careful if you need to press any charges. If your partner or someone else snoops on your phone while you sleep, that’s a big fear. But not all such actions can be malicious. Perhaps it was your child who got your smartphone. ..