I hate installing apps to save money, but this Pixel privacy feature makes it worthwhile

Prices at fast food chains, restaurants, and even grocery stores have spiraled out of control over the past couple of years. Luckily, not all hope is lost — if you’re a savvy shopper, you might know that the best way to save real money is to check for loyalty program discounts and limited-time offers. The only problem? Most of these offers require you to download each company’s app and check into them from time to time.

If installing a dozen different apps sounds like a privacy nightmare, I wholeheartedly agree. But luckily, I’ve found a way to use these apps without the downsides — and it’s all thanks to a Pixel feature that has existed since last October.

Company-specific apps like Target, Walgreens, 7-Eleven, and Wendy’s tend to offer great deals, at least from time to time, but I’ve found living with these apps to be a headache. The first problem is storage and clutter on my phone. Even if I ignore the cost of storage, each icon takes up visual space in the app drawer and it’s annoying to scroll past dozens of mostly unused apps every single time.

Then there’s the background activity. Most companies want you to install their app instead of a website so that they can sync data, sneak in notifications like reminders about new menu items, or passively track your location and browsing habits in the background. It’s not always that bad, of course, but multiplied across a handful of chains, it can all add up to a noticeable increase in battery drain and data usage. Privacy is the other big concern. I’ve turned off notifications and most permissions for these apps, but they can still potentially collect information like which Google accounts I have logged into my phone.

For a long time, I limited myself to keeping just one or two of these apps on my phone and convinced myself that the extra savings weren’t worth signing away my data to every single company out there. Of course, that’s not ideal — saving money matters more than ever in this era of ever-increasing inflation. So when I found out that the Pixel’s Private Space feature could give me the best of both worlds, savings and privacy, I jumped on it.

Private Space is a privacy-oriented feature, first introduced alongside Android 15 last year. While it’s not exactly a Pixel-exclusive feature, you won’t find it on many other phones. Motorola and Samsung don’t include it in their Android skins, for example, but both brands offer Secure Folder as their own first-party alternative. ASUS does support it, though, as does Sony.

Nevertheless, when you enable Private Space, you get what’s essentially a secondary user profile with its own authentication, app list, and even Google account. Anything you install within Private Space is heavily sandboxed and isolated from the rest of your phone.

Besides the privacy aspect, I find that keeping my least used apps in the Private Space also cuts down on clutter. Anything you move into it disappears from your main app drawer and search results until you unlock the section. With all of these benefits, it’s easy to see how this setup can be invaluable. Starbucks, Kroger, and even spammy shopping apps like Temu can all live in Private Space, out of sight and out of mind until it’s time to check for a deal.

I’m not claiming that Private Space will magically solve every privacy concern. After all, these apps still track your usage as you use them, but it does make the overall experience far more tolerable. I have set the feature to automatically lock all of its contents every time I lock my phone, which means that the sessions are very short-lived.

The main drawback to the feature is that apps in Private Space can’t reliably send notifications. Once the space is locked, those apps stay asleep until you open it again. But for me, that’s more of a benefit than a problem. The whole point of putting these apps there is to keep them from pestering me with alerts or quietly maintaining a data connection in the background.

Finally, I keep a separate Google account logged into Private Space — and I make sure that I only ever use it for marketing sign-ups and loyalty programs. That way, when I need to log into a fast-food or retail app, I can do it with this burner account instead of handing over my main Gmail address. It gives me peace of mind that my primary inbox won’t be flooded with promotions, and if one of these companies inevitably suffers a data breach, I’m not exposing the account I rely on for everything else.

As an aside, I’ve also found it handy to duplicate a few apps inside Private Space that I already use in my main profile. I use Google Photos via my burner account, for example, so I can quickly store scanned IDs, receipts, and other documents without mixing them in with personal photos on my primary account. The whole Private Space setup is flexible enough that you don’t have to limit yourself to just one use case.

At the end of the day, I’d rather not have to install a dozen different apps just to save a few bucks every now and then. But since that’s the reality we live in, Private Space is the best way I’ve found to keep the clutter and data harvesting under control while still benefiting from every last offer out there.