The touchscreen’s sensitivity has improved as display technology advances. However, touchscreen displays can be prone to accidental tapping. Senior citizens and children may be able to accidentally input data on mobile devices that use touchscreens instead of physical keyboards.
Did you know that you can disable the touchscreen controls temporarily on your mobile phone?
Why you might lock your touchscreen
It’s frustrating when you accidentally interact with your phone. Everyone has this experience from time to time.
Examples include:
- A video can be paused or stopped by accident.
- The track will pause or skip when you listen to music.
- When your phone is mounted to the dashboard, you can’t see the GPS.
- Instead of playing games or watching videos, kids are fiddling with their phone settings
- Pause or stop recording video
- Ghost Touch Issues
The last two points deserve further investigation.
Ghost Touches Water
Ghost touch issues have plagued some phones in the past. It’s a touchscreen issue where the screen reacts to touches that you don’t actually make. These problems can be very annoying.
A temporary fix is to disable a part of the touchscreen and block the touch interactions for a specific area on the screen. It’s not a permanent solution, as you will need to repair the screen eventually.
It’s easy to be tempted by the growing number of waterproof smartphones on the market. There’s usually some ghosting when water touches the screen.
Accidental touches can stop or pause the recording, even if you are simply filming in the rain. You could lock the screen and disable the touchscreen to record videos flawlessly.
You can lock your Android phone to one app
Disabling your touchscreen can be helpful if you are experiencing the problems with apps mentioned above. There’s an alternative to disabling the touchscreen completely.
Android has a feature called app pinning that allows you to lock your phone down to one particular application.
You can “pin” YouTube Kids, for example. You can navigate the app but your kids won’t be allowed to switch apps.
How to enable App Pinning in Android 13
- Open Settings > Security > System security
- You can search for “app pinning ” to find this.
- Set to On (note that Navigation gestures must be disabled to use app pinning).
- After unpinning you can enable lock screen, which is a backup feature in case this feature has been disabled.
How to pin an application:
- Start the app that you wish to pin.
- Tap Recents
- App swipe to open
- Click the menu
- Select Pin
You will receive instructions on unpinning the app. It is done by holding Back and Recents. However, on some devices, dual-taps along with navigation gestures may not be available.
Use Screen Pinnaging on Older Android Models
If you have Android 8.1 or earlier, you can freeze the screen by following these steps:
- Click on the app that you wish to pin.
- Click the Overview/Recent Apps button.
- Tap the Pin icon in the lower-right corner of the Recent card.
Use these steps if you have Android 9 and newer.
- Open the app that you wish to pin.
- Open the app switcher. This will depend on how you navigate.
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- Tap the Recents square button if you are using the classic navigation with three buttons.
- You can swipe up and hold the screen for a few seconds if you’re using the Android 10 gestures or the two-button navigation.
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- Choose Pin from the menu at the top of your app.
Hold the Back on your device for approximately five seconds to unpin an application with two or three buttons of navigation. You can also swipe up and hold if you’ve enabled Android gesture navigation. After entering your unlock PIN the app will unpin.
This feature is only useful in a limited number of situations, like when you lock the YouTube screen. This feature does not solve any of the problems mentioned above, including the ghost touch issue.
To fix this problem, you will need to disable your touchscreen.