Somebody I don't know reviewed an early look at Snugit and left one suggestion, almost as an aside: "consider only if it fits your product vision, but you might want a way to protect sensitive data — let people mark something as sensitive and lock it behind a password, pattern, or fingerprint."
That's it. One paragraph, clearly optional, clearly not a demand. And it was immediately obvious it should ship.
Why it was an easy yes
Snugit's whole pitch is "save anything" — but "anything" includes things people don't necessarily want visible to whoever else picks up their phone. A screenshot of a password. A photo you saved for yourself and nobody else. A file with something private in it. If the app is honest about being a catch-all, it has to account for the stuff that isn't meant to be casually glanced at.
Scoping it down on purpose
The suggestion mentioned three unlock methods — password, pattern, fingerprint. I picked one: Face ID and Touch ID, with the device passcode as an automatic fallback. Not because the other options are bad, but because that's already the exact pattern iOS users know from Notes' own locked notes — no new mental model to learn, no password to invent and forget. Familiar beats novel here.
I also decided against actually encrypting the data behind it, at least for this pass. What shipped is a real access gate — Face ID stands between you and a locked item's content, full stop — but it's not file-level encryption yet. I'd rather ship something honest about what it does than something that implies more security than it delivers.
What actually shipped
Any saved item can be marked Locked from its menu. Locked items still show up in Home, Search, and your Pinned shelf — Snugit doesn't hide that they exist — but the row shows nothing but a lock icon and the word "Locked" until you authenticate. No title, no preview, no way to act on it until Face ID clears it.
That unlock only lasts for the current app session, and it's not saved anywhere — closing the app or sending it to the background re-locks everything immediately. Unlock a locked note, switch to check a message, come back, and it's locked again. That was a deliberate call: a "lock" that stays open all day isn't really a lock.
The actual point of this post
I didn't ask for that feedback. It showed up from someone with no stake in Snugit succeeding, who took a few minutes to actually think about what was missing. That's a genuinely rare thing to get for free, and ignoring it because it wasn't on the roadmap would've been the wrong call. If you've got a suggestion, even a small one — I'm reading them.
Download Snugit to see it — and everything else that's shipped since.
More on why this is being built out in the open at all: why I'm building Snugit in public.