Huawei PrivateSpace – The safe of phones with EMUI

The distant year of 2018 was the year of the GDPR and the topic of data protection comes up more and more when it comes to the Internet. If you want to keep your private information private, you can spend money on applications or cloud services – or you can use the private space function on your devices HUAWEI.

What PrivateSpace is and what it can do is what we will detail in this article.

What is a private space?

The Private Space feature was used for the first time with Android 8 / EMUI 8 and presented a way to expand the smartphone with a second independent environment. Basically we have a second smartphone inside our smartphone. Seems confused? It really isn’t.

Whoever deals with the IT world more often already knows the terms of virtual environments or Docker Containers. Both technologies have the same goal. They offer the possibility to run different operating systems or applications in isolated areas on a computer.

That’s how PrivateSpace works. A new isolated environment is created on the existing smartphone so that the user has a second independent Android system on the same smartphone.

Is it a completely isolated system? Not quite – some settings and areas are shared. These include:

• WiFi connections
• Bluetooth
• Phone (calls, call history)
• SMS

But enough “theory” – let’s get to practical experience.

Enable PrivateSpace

First of all, not all devices support private space. There is no official list provided by HUAWEI, but it is present at least in the latest generation devices. Our test showed that not all Lite models currently offer this functionality.

Under Settings -> Privacy -> Private Space they can activate the feature. Before you start, you must have a server on how you want to access private space. A separate PIN is required, using a different fingerprint is optional.

After setting the PIN or fingerprint, PrivateSpace is created in seconds and the user has direct access to the new interface. The first impression is that they redefined the phone, as it looks as if it came from the factory.

private space takes nothing out of main memory (MainSpace) – neither applications nor configurations!

That’s exactly how it should be. However, it looks like another phone at first, because the settings are different. In my case, gesture control is disabled, the keyboard is not configured as before and I noticed many other details.

MainSpace? As we have two systems with PrivateSpace, the main system is called MainSpace and the second newly created system is called private space. One can simply say data storage A and B.

Application scenarios

In my testing phase, I was able to take a look and find out who the role might be really interesting.

First, it is a classic example of business people who want to use the smartphone for professional and private use, instead of using two different devices. The advantages are clear: through PrivateSpace, the user separates their two worlds perfectly and can separate business data from private data. In addition, the dual sim option on HUAWEI also helps to put the project into practice.

When in the business area, private space allows you to protect your contacts and business emails in an isolated environment, phone histories or SMS messages cannot be isolated.

private space would be a good solution to separate hobbies or leisure activities from the normal environment on your phone.

If you want to go a step further and hide the second system completely, you can configure it in the settings (in PrivateSpace). Subsequently, only the person who knows the PIN or who registered the fingerprint can access and have access to private space.

In this way, parents can provide their children with an environment that contains only applications suitable for children.

If you just want to try something in a kind of sandbox (test environment), you will certainly like the PrivateSpace function.

Conclusion

Is private space a future-proof resource? Who can do that?

private space was created as part of and based on Android Enterprise for business people, but anyone with some creativity can benefit from this function. I have already given several examples and there will still be many scenarios that justify a private space.

Technically everything works very stably, it is clear that the change between spaces takes a few seconds. A point that can certainly be optimized in the future.

Another point is the transfer of data between the respective spaces.

For reasons of data and battery protection, parallel operation of both spaces is not possible. This means that there is no possibility to receive real-time notifications from both systems at the same time.
Certainly, there will be people who want exactly this “hang up” function.

There is an important function that is rarely used, but that I personally taste much. Since private space is not linked to the smartphone, it is possible to move it to other smartphones. This saves a new configuration.

In summary, I can say that I am now using the resource to create material for the blog or to test various AndroidGeek applications by isolating my personal data.

The system is not perfect. Some things can be optimized – for example, the parallel operation of the two systems.

What is your opinion about PrivateSpace?