340 camera accesses in one day. I hadn't taken a photo.
The short version: 340 is the number that made me build this app. It is not a number that proves anything sinister — and that turned out to be the actual problem. I had a count and no way to tell which of those accesses deserved my attention.
One evening I opened a screen on my phone that most people never open:
Settings → Privacy → Privacy dashboard → Camera
It's a timeline of every app that has opened your camera. Android keeps 24 hours of it on Android 12, and 7 days from Android 13 onwards.
Mine showed 340 accesses in one ordinary day. I hadn't taken a single photo.
What that number actually means
Let me be straight about this, because it would be very easy to write the scary version and I'd rather not.
340 is not proof that anyone was watching me. Most of those accesses were almost certainly mundane: apps preparing the camera when I opened them, a scanner checking the sensor was available, system components doing their job. If you check your own dashboard and find a number in the hundreds, that is common and it is usually fine.
The reason it stopped me wasn't the size of the number. It was that I had no way to interpret it.
The dashboard gave me a count and a list of app names. It didn't tell me how long any single access lasted — the difference between a 200-millisecond permission check and four minutes of the camera being held open. It didn't tell me whether my screen was locked at the time. And it wouldn't tell me anything at all about the day before that.
So I was looking at 340 events, of which maybe 339 were completely ordinary, with no way to find the one that wasn't. That's not reassuring. That's just noise where information should be.
Android already knew
The thing that struck me is that none of this is hidden. Android writes every access down. The record exists.
It just never tells you at the moment it happens.
There's an indicator — the green dot in the top corner when an app opens your camera or mic. It works exactly as advertised. It also lasts about five seconds, and my phone spends most of its day in a pocket, face down on a desk, or charging in another room while I'm asleep. The dot was doing its job in the dark, to nobody. (More on what it does and doesn't cover in what Android's green dot doesn't tell you.)
So the information exists, and it's kept, and it's discarded on a timer, and it's never delivered when it would matter. That gap is the entire reason this app exists.
So I built the part that tells you
Spytrap alerts you the second an app opens your camera or microphone — including on the lock screen, which is precisely when you're not looking — and keeps the log Android throws away: which app, when, for how long, and whether your screen was locked.
That last field is the one that turns a count into an answer. A video app with fifty camera accesses during the day is a video app working normally. The same app with three accesses at 3am while the phone was locked on a nightstand is a question worth asking. Same events, completely different meaning, and you cannot tell them apart from a number alone.
It runs entirely on your device. No account, no cloud, nothing uploaded.
Two things I want to be straight about
This is a privacy app. You should be able to trust what it tells you, which means I need to be honest about the parts that didn't go well.
1. I got a name wrong
I shipped a setting called "Auto-block on lock."
That name was wrong, and it was wrong in the worst possible direction — it promised more than the app can do. Android does not let any app block another app's camera or microphone. No third-party app has that power, mine included. What an app can do is detect the access, alert you, and take you to the setting where you can revoke the permission yourself.
So I renamed it "Alert on lock." Same feature, doing exactly what it always did — honest name.
I'm flagging it here rather than quietly shipping the rename, because a privacy app that overclaims is worse than no privacy app at all. If a tool tells you it's blocking something it isn't blocking, you'll stop checking, and you'll be less safe than if you'd never installed it. That's the whole point of the category.
It's also a useful thing to know when you're shopping around: if an Android app claims it can block another app's camera in real time, it can't.
2. Some phones will kill it
Several manufacturers — this is well documented across the Android world — run aggressive battery optimisers that terminate background services, whatever those services are doing.
That means Spytrap can be killed, and while it's dead it isn't watching.
The tempting thing to do is say nothing and show you a clean log. An empty log looks like good news. It's the same failure as a smoke alarm with a flat battery: silence reads as safety.
So instead the service writes a heartbeat every minute. If it gets killed and comes back, it can see the gap in its own timeline, and it tells you: I missed this stretch. A log with an honest hole in it is worth more than a clean one you can't trust. (There's a fuller technical account of that and the rest of the detection design in this write-up, including the parts that don't work.)
Go and look at your own number
Genuinely, do this before you consider installing anything:
- Open Settings
- Tap Privacy — on Samsung it's under Security & privacy
- Tap Privacy dashboard
- Tap Camera
Whatever number you find, the interesting part isn't the total. It's whether you recognise the apps in the list, and whether you can explain the ones you don't. If an app is in there that has no business needing a camera, you can fix that today for free — here's how to revoke it.
If, after that, you want the alert at the moment it happens and the history that doesn't expire, that's what Spytrap is. One-time $0.99, 9.5 MB, no account, no subscription, nothing leaves your phone. It detects that a sensor was used — it never touches your photos, video or audio.
Get Spytrap on Google Play — $0.99 →