Private Space on Android 15: What It Is

Private Space is an Android feature, announced for Android 15, that creates a separate and lockable area on your phone where you can keep sensitive apps out of sight. Rather than locking individual apps one by one, it sets up what amounts to a hidden second profile: a distinct space with its own apps and data that you can lock behind a passcode and even hide from your app drawer entirely. When it is locked, the apps inside effectively disappear from the rest of the phone.

Google first showed hints of this in earlier beta builds and then announced it properly for Android 15 at its 2024 developer conference. Because menu names and behaviour can shift slightly between betas and the final release, Google’s own help pages are the most reliable reference for the exact wording on your device.

How Private Space is different from an app locker

Plenty of third-party “app lock” tools let you put a PIN in front of a single app. Private Space is a more thorough idea. Traditional app lockers live on your primary profile and simply gate individual apps; the apps, their icons, and their notifications still exist out in the open. Private Space instead behaves like a separate user profile that is not readily visible. The apps installed inside it, and the data they hold, are isolated from your main profile.

That isolation is the point. A banking app, a dating app, private photos stored in a gallery app, or anything else you would rather others not stumble onto can live inside the space, sealed off from the phone you hand to a friend or a child.

What Private Space can do

Several capabilities make it genuinely private rather than just tidy. Apps placed inside the space can isolate their data from the rest of your phone. You switch deliberately between your main profile and the private space, so its apps are not mingled into your normal app drawer. You can set a separate lock for the space; if you do not set one, the device screen lock is used by default.

Most importantly, you can hide the space’s very existence from the app drawer. When the space is locked, its apps are hidden from notifications, settings, and recents, and their usage data drops out of system views such as the permission manager and the privacy dashboard. In other words, a locked Private Space leaves almost no trace in the everyday places someone might go looking. If you hide the drawer entry, you can still reach the space by searching for “Private Space” in the app drawer.

Setting it up and getting in

You create Private Space from Settings, under Security and privacy, where you will find a Private space entry. Once created, the space typically appears as a dedicated section at the bottom of your app drawer. From there you install apps into it just as you would normally, except those apps live only inside the space.

When it comes to the lock, you have a choice that matters. Using the same lock as your device is convenient, but it means anyone who can unlock your phone can also open the space. Setting a separate, different lock is the more private option and is worth doing if the whole reason you are using Private Space is to keep things away from people who already know your main passcode.

Living with Private Space day to day

In normal use the space stays locked and out of the way. When you want something inside it, you scroll to the Private Space section of the app drawer (or search for it if you have hidden the entry), unlock it, and use your apps as usual. When you are done, locking it again, or simply letting it relock, makes its apps vanish from the drawer, recents, and notifications once more. Many people treat it like a drawer they open briefly and close rather than a space they live in all day.

A few habits make it work well. Install the sensitive app directly inside the space rather than trying to move an existing one, since the space keeps its own separate copy and data. Remember that notifications from locked apps are suppressed, so a chat app inside Private Space will not buzz you until you unlock the space; that is the privacy trade-off working as intended. And decide deliberately whether to hide the drawer entry: hiding it is more discreet, but you will need to remember the search trick to get back in.

Who Private Space is for

Private Space suits anyone who regularly hands their unlocked phone to other people, parents passing a device to a child to watch videos, or people who simply want sensitive apps, finance, dating, health, or private photo galleries, kept behind a second barrier. It is not aimed at hiding wrongdoing or defeating forensic examination; it is a everyday-privacy tool for ordinary situations where you would rather certain apps not be visible at a glance.

What Private Space does not do

It is important to be honest about the limits, because treating a privacy feature as more absolute than it is can lead to bad decisions.

Google is explicit that in some cases you cannot hide the space’s existence from others who install apps on your phone, from someone who connects your device to a computer including through Android Debug Bridge, from certain other apps that can detect it, or in device logs. And because the space’s on-device data is not backed up, anything you store there could be lost if the phone is reset or fails. Treat Private Space as a strong privacy layer for day-to-day prying eyes, not as a vault against a determined technical adversary.

Where it fits in

Private Space is one of several thoughtful additions in recent Android releases, and it pairs naturally with understanding your phone’s other systems. Because the space holds its own copy of apps and their data, it does consume storage; if you are weighing what fills your phone, our explainer on RAM versus storage on a phone clarifies which resource that affects. Keeping those apps tidy also helps, and our guide on how to clear cache on Android applies to apps inside the space too.

If a phone running extra profiles starts to feel sluggish, that is usually unrelated to Private Space itself; the common reasons are covered in why your Android phone slows down. For more Android features unpacked without the jargon, the rest of our tech explainers are a good place to continue. The bottom line on Private Space: it is a genuinely useful, built-in way to hide and lock sensitive apps, as long as you set a separate lock and remember its honest limits.