Chakam
Chakam reads real conversations — some of the most private material anyone has on their phone. A locked chat app is one thing; a phone someone else can pick up and open Chakam on is a different kind of exposure entirely, especially for anyone whose situation makes that a real risk. Chakam can now lock itself behind a PIN or biometrics, independent of whatever is or isn’t protecting the rest of the phone.
What Actually Gets Locked
This isn’t a lock on one chat or one analysis — it’s the whole app. With the lock turned on, opening Chakam at all requires the PIN (or Face ID, Touch ID, fingerprint, whichever is enabled), and that requirement comes back every time the app is backgrounded and reopened, not just on a cold launch. Switch to another app for ten seconds and come back, and the lock screen is there waiting, every time.
Setting It Up
In Settings, Lock your analyses toggles the whole thing on — the subtitle says exactly what it does: “Require a PIN or biometrics to open the app.” Turning it on walks through setting a 4-digit PIN; if the device supports Face ID, Touch ID, or fingerprint, a second toggle appears to layer that on top for a faster day-to-day unlock, with the PIN as the fallback.
Lock your own analyses — available for Chakam Plus.
Why Your PIN Is Never Actually Stored
This is the part worth explaining properly, because it’s the actual security guarantee. Chakam doesn’t save your PIN anywhere — not in plain text, not encrypted, not anywhere at all. What gets saved is a salted hash: the PIN run through SHA-256 together with a random value unique to your device, producing a one-way fingerprint that can verify a correct PIN without ever storing the PIN itself. That hash lives in the device’s own secure storage — the Keychain on iOS, Keystore-backed storage on Android — the same vault-like system the OS itself uses for passwords and encryption keys. Even a full read of that storage can’t be worked backward into the actual PIN.
The Forgot-PIN Flow Isn’t a Backdoor
A lot of app-level PIN systems quietly undercut themselves with a weak reset flow — an email link, a security question, something that ends up being the actual weak point. Chakam doesn’t build a custom reset at all. Forgetting the PIN hands off to the device’s own biometric-or-passcode prompt — the same Face ID or passcode that unlocks the phone itself. The reasoning is straightforward: if someone can already unlock your phone, trusting that as recovery is no less secure than anything a custom flow could add, and it’s one less thing to go wrong.
biometric-unlock.jpg
Who This Is Actually For
Shared devices, roommates, a partner who sometimes picks up your phone to check the time, a kid who knows the passcode — any situation where “my phone is locked” doesn’t fully cover “nobody else can open this specific app.” It also matters for anyone analyzing a conversation about a relationship that isn’t fully safe to have visible — the lock means Chakam being open on a borrowed or glanced-at phone isn’t an option at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the PIN lock free or part of Chakam Plus?
It’s a Chakam Plus feature. Toggling it on from Settings opens the paywall if it isn’t already active.
What happens if I enter the wrong PIN too many times?
There’s no separate lockout timer on top of the PIN itself — a wrong entry just shakes and clears, and you try again. The actual backstop is that the PIN is never stored anywhere recoverable, so repeated guessing doesn’t expose anything beyond normal brute-force odds on a 4-digit code, the same as any phone passcode.
Does turning the lock off delete my PIN too?
Yes — turning the lock off clears the stored PIN hash and switches biometrics off with it. There’s no lock state left to protect once it’s off, so there’s nothing left behind to clean up later if you turn it back on.