How To Use Screen Pinning Feature on Samsung Galaxy Devices!

One of cool features that was introduced in Android 5.0 Lollipop was “Screen Pinning” feature. This feature allows you to lock your phone on a specific screen to prevent from an authorized use.

Note:

This feature was introduced in Galaxy S6/S6 Edge and is also available on 5.1.1 update for Galaxy Note 4 and should be also accessible on other Galaxy phones running Android 5.1.1 or later.

 

How can this be useful?

Say for example your friend asks your phone for making a call, and you want to make sure that he/she ONLY have access to the “Phone” app and nothing else.  This is where “Screen Pinning” feature comes in handy, you can “Pin” the screen on the “Phone app” screen to prevent him/her from opening any other apps without your permission.

STEPS:

1. Navigate to Settings > Security.

How to Use Screen Pinning Feature on Samsung Galaxy Devices

2. Scroll down to the bottom and tap on “Pin Windows”.

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3. A new screen will show up which gives you info about this feature as shown in the screenshot below.

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4. Notice the new option “Use screen lock to unpin”.  Enabling this will prevent the other user from going out of the pinned screen unless he/she knows your lock screen combination!   So remember to enable this option.

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5. Tapping on the above option will open up “Lock Screen” tab (if you didn’t set up any lock screen method as I did in this example), otherwise it will simply use your current lock screen method for going out of the pinned screen.

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6. Next, open the app you want to pin, and then tap on the “Recent Apps” button which is the left button.

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Notice the “Pin” icon on the below screenshot.

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7. Tapping on the “Pin” button will open up the selected app and will pin its screen. On the below screen choose “START” to pin the screen.

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8. To get out of the pinned screen, the user needs to tap and hold on both “Back button + Recent Apps button” at the same time. But since we secured the pinned screen in Step 4, the other user won’t be able to use your phone and when he/she does this step, he/she will be redirected to the lock screen which has to be bypassed in order to use the phone.

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Have a question?

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Rawand Haidar

Rawand is Petroleum Engineer.He is Super high on Android. Rawand has been blogging since 2011, written more than 150 articles including tutorials, news, reviews about Android. He is interested in all things Android. Follow Me on Twitter