It may be that you had to give someone your Android smartphone and you decided to hide certain applications that you did not want them to know that you have installed.
The problem can come later, once you have the phone in your hands again and you realize that you are not very clear about how to recover them to get them back up and running like before.
There are currently several ways to get these applications back on the smartphone.
Keep in mind that smartphones are not all the same, so you may need to install a launcher that provides the following steps verbatim or adapt its movements to the different layers of Android.
How to find hidden apps on Android:
with configuration
The Settings application is one of those parts of Android terminals that is less known by the average user, having at its disposal functions that you probably don’t know about.
To get hidden applications to be seen using this part of the Android phone, we must do the following:
- We touch the icon settings and we choose Applications. If this is not exactly the case on your phone due to the customization layer, you should know that you have to enter the area where your phone’s applications are.
- Now we enter the option See all apps.
- If we have disabled and hidden applications, we should find the option to see only this software. We must look for a drop-down menu that shows us Disabled or disabled apps.
app drawer
The vast majority of the customization layers that exist in Android are in the application drawer as a common place so that we can see all those that we have installed.
We will see all applications when we slide up the home screen of your phone or when we touch the drawer icon of applications at the bottom.
From here, many terminals allow you to hide and show applications, in addition to which there are also several that allow alternative features, such as folders.
When we search for hidden applications, we must make sure that We also look for these folderssince they can hide the applications they contain.
special access
On the menu Applicationsthere is usually an option called Special application access or something similar, where they are broken down by the privileges they have on the phone.
If we agree to Access to all fileswe will see all the applications that can use your digital files with the ability to filter by apps with access to images, notifications, WiFi control and more.
In this way we can reduce the programs that are presented and be much more effective when looking for hidden applications in Android.
file manager
We can also use the file manager to see the apps, a program that in most terminals comes as Files.
So, if we touch the icon of the corresponding file manager, we can open a list of categories and tools.
The best is to go to Applications and so We will see all the programs that we have installed on the device. In addition to showing hidden and forgotten apps, you can also manage each item from here, being able to share or uninstall them.
In any case, we can find that the file manager does not show the system applications that are part of the basic functions of the device. That is, the file manager only shows the downloaded apps and not the ones that already came with the system.
To solve this we must install apps like a Cx File Explorer in order to obtain all the details of the hidden apps on the phone, whether they are system or not.
With a new launcher
As you well know, if the customization layer that your mobile has does not quite convince you, we will always be able to take advantage of third-party launchers, applications such as Microsoft Launcher and New Launcherare among the best on Google Play, which are capable of changing the appearance of the device, being able to modify it to our liking.
Thanks to this software (not all launchers do) we can have a hidden apps tab in the app drawer, while also showing the most used apps on the device.
With all the methods that you have read, you will be able to see which applications you have hidden on your Android and thus make these apps active again or not, the choice is yours.
