Blackphone To Be Updated With First Ever Privacy-Focused App Store

Blackphone - an anti surveillance smartphone - will be updated with a privacy-focused and secure app store for apps that don't spy or collect data. 

Blackphone is a product of collaboration between hardware manufacture Geeksphone and Silent Circle. The 'anti surveillance smartphone' aims to keep your communication and data safe. The phone has an inbuilt tight encryption and comes with a subscription to services that would further protect your calls, texts and emails. 

According to the recent announcement, the Blackphone app store will be launched in January and will examine apps before allowing them in the store - similar to how Apple App Store works. 

"We'll have a few degrees of vetting," Blackphone chief executive Toby Weir-Jones told the Guardian. "We'll validate that the apps will do what they intend - call it the Apple model. If you have an app to manage your social media accounts and it wanted access to your microphone and your camera we might ask why and get on a first screening."

Blackphone is based on Android, still its users are not allowed access to Google's Play Store and are left to use Amazon's app store.

The company also hopes to lure in corporate users by building necessary apps. 

"But we're not intending to replicate a mass-market app store right now," Weir-Jones added. "We're not going to do games or have our own versions of social network apps. We're much more interested in a private marketplace with quality apps with things that have a broad alignment with our privacy and security focus."