Redmorph app review: 'The' privacy solution for your vulnerable smartphone

Lately, we as smartphone users have become protective towards our data. No, we aren’t talking about your usual photos and videos, but the data that you generate unknowingly — usage patterns and habits. The sudden boom in the smartphone industry a few years ago has undoubtedly made our lives a lot easier but has also exposed us to unknown risks and threats. Various websites and apps now track our activities and help advertising agencies to tailor ads accordingly. Sometimes, data is also tracked for malicious reasons through these apps or websites, resulting in cyberattacks staged on massive scales.

While OS developers such as Google and Apple are doing their best to keep users safe from hackers with malicious intentions, their efforts often take time to reach the end user, unfortunately exposing them to unknown risks. Therefore, one needs third-party apps to do the job on an immediate basis. Redmorph Inc has something on its plate to cater to the problem we elaborated — The Ultimate Privacy Solution app.

With a reassuring name, the app exists to catch real-time trackers through various sources and offer users to exercise control over them. The app is free to download for Android but grants its services for free only for 21 days, post which one needs to pay Rs 50 per month to continue its services. While all this sounds promising, does it really have the power to help users keep their privacy safe? Let's find out.

User Interface

Data security and privacy app tend to have a user-friendly interface with bright colours and intuitive illustrations. With Redmorph’s version, no difference has been made to this trend at all. The app adorns an all-red-white combo through its various windows and menus. The home screen of the app opens to the Dashboard tab, which shows the top five apps tracking data inform of bar graphs.

The Security tab opens up a window that shows the current status of all the installed apps — one can choose the amount of protection required from an individual app, i.e. whether to give an app access to Wi-Fi/mobile data or go through all the permissions that have been given to the particular app. The Live View tab shows the status of the running apps in real-time; you can also check out all the trackers in a web-like illustration.

There’s also a menu, housing all the important settings, including the most important ‘ON/OFF’ toggle. You can also check for app and security definitions updates here.

Performance

The app’s primary duty is to hunt for various kinds of trackers in real-time and convey it to the user, upon whom it depends whether to permit that particular tracker or block it completely. To keep the user anonymous from all the tracking elements, the app automatically channels the mobile data and Wi-Fi connections through a built-in Virtual Private Network or VPN.

When you are checking out all the installed apps or a particular website on a web browser, the Redmorph Privacy Solution kicks in to actively block trackers and only allow necessary data to come through. The Sentinel features work effectively in notifying of any anomaly observed by the app. The active tracking algorithms block unwanted pop-ups and malicious websites while browsing, which makes surfing the Internet a pleasant experience. Redmorph claims that their service helps in reducing unnecessary data usage and improves page loading times — something that we experienced occasionally on healthy network conditions. On the whole, it almost looks good, but…

Yes, there’s a big ‘but’ here. Security solutions do not come cheap — it has a huge impact on the device’s performance, and this one is no exception. Since it uses a VPN service to route your information through a safe channel, usually reduced Internet speeds without any warning or notification were noticed on our device. Additionally, we also noticed strain on the smartphone, such as battery life and performance, which could be due to the fact that the service is always running in the background.

However, the biggest issue is its requirement — most apps and services these days need to rely on trackers to generate revenue, which is why most apps need the user to grant all kinds of access to the device’s various parameters. App developers need to build in tracking mechanisms in their apps to understand various unknown issues and fix them over subsequent updates. The moment you block access to an app, it doesn’t perform the way it’s supposed, resulting in unsatisfactory user experience (or the app not opening at all).

Verdict:

The Redmorph Privacy Solution app will only appeal to those are extremely bothered about the Internet tracking each and every activity on a smartphone. However, as we stated, most apps and services won’t function in a way that is required to provide an optimum user experience. Therefore, using this app to create obstacles in your daily user experience, that too after paying a monthly subscription, doesn’t make sense.

However, if keeping a tab on all the incoming and outgoing traffic on your device is your idea of keeping your device safe from malicious intentions, then Redmorph’s Privacy Solution app is recommendable.

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