Don't Touch, the anti-theft alarm that guards your iPhone on the table

What does it watch for?

• Motion Alarm: the accelerometer notices a pickup, tilt or slide. You set how touchy it is with Motion Sensitivity.
• Charger Alarm: if the phone was charging when you armed it, pulling the cable out sets off the siren. On by default.
• Pocket Alarm: the proximity sensor notices the phone being drawn out of a pocket or bag. Off by default; switch it on in Settings.
• Once triggered, the siren loops until someone types the right 4-digit PIN, and a notification titled "Alarm triggered" names the reason.

Quick start: arm it in under a minute

1. Open the app. A short walkthrough explains the alarms and asks you to allow notifications, so you hear about a trigger even from across the room.
2. Set a 4-digit PIN, then Confirm your PIN.
3. Plug in the charger first if you want the cable guarded too.
4. Tap ARM. The first time, iOS also asks to allow motion access — allow it. The screen says Arming — put your phone down now and counts down 5 seconds by default.
5. Leave the app open with the screen on. It reads Armed. Don't touch it. and shows which guards are really active.
6. Back at the table, tap DISARM and enter your PIN.

Free, and what Pro adds

The app is free to download. All three alarms, the PIN, the siren and the trigger notification work without paying anything. The free plan gives you two sounds, Siren and Alarm Beep, and keeps the last 3 events in the Intruder Log. Ads show up while the phone is disarmed and never while the siren is going.

Pro is worth considering for daily use: it adds a silent front-camera photo of whoever set off the alarm, all 5 sounds for good, unlimited log history and no ads. If you're not ready to spend money, Police Wail, Scream and Dog Bark can each be tried for one app session by sitting through a short ad.

Privacy, offline use and permissions

There is no account to sign into. The alarm, the PIN and the log all live on your phone. The PIN is stored only as a salted hash, never as plain text, and Pro photos stay in the app's own storage. The internet gets used for ads and App Store purchases only, so the alarm keeps working with no signal, such as in airplane mode.

• Motion & Fitness: to feel the phone being moved.
• Notifications: to tell you the alarm went off.
• Camera: Pro only, for the intruder photo, requested when you arm rather than at the moment of a theft.
• Tracking: only decides whether ads are personalized. Saying no still shows ads, just non-personalized ones.

What it cannot do

It has to stay open, armed and on screen. Switching to another app, even briefly, stops the motion guard with no warning. Like every iPhone app, Don't Touch cannot keep reading the sensors once it is sent to the background, so it is not an alarm for a bag you walk away from with another app in front.

It is also not a tracker. If a phone is already gone, it cannot locate, lock or erase it, so keep Apple's Find My switched on too. Don't Touch is iPhone only, in portrait.