Type Machine is a new app that securely saves all of your typed information on your phone

February 23, 2014

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There’s a handy new app in the Play Store that does you the favor of backing up tons of your important information automatically, just in case something bad happens to the app you’re typing in before you can back it up yourself. Type Machine acts as a service that automatically records all of the text from whatever app you’re using, functioning as a pretty powerful “time machine” in case your app crashes or you just want a history of what you’ve typed in case you change your mind, like in an extremely long email.

It works by setting itself up as a service, which then keeps an eye on whatever you type. It stores your typed messages in its own app, letting you filter between different apps (your typing in Gmail is kept separate from Keep, for example) and scrub through what you’ve typed, letting you go back to a previous version of a typed message. From here, it’s simple to copy the text from Type Machine and paste it back into an app.

At first glance, Type Machine basically looks like a keylogger, which sounds pretty dangerous. Fortunately, there are plenty of things in place to keep this app safe from offloading your passwords to some obscure server in China. Most importantly, Type Machine has no internet access, so even if it was storing any extra personal information, it would have no way of doing anything with it. You can also set up a pin lock so others can’t go snooping through the app on your phone, and it doesn’t save any passwords from your web browser or apps. It can also completely blacklist applications, so you could have it monitoring all of your apps except for your text messages and banking apps, for instance.

Type Machine is a very useful app that you should considering adding to your utility belt on your Android device. It’s only 2 bucks, too.