Make your app private: invite-only access for the people you choose

Not everything you make is meant for the whole internet. The class schedule for your students. The order screen your two staff actually run the day on. The little app you built for your family, or for a group that’s yours and no one else’s.

Until now, every app you published with whacka was open to anyone with the link. Now it doesn’t have to be. You can make a published app private — hidden from the public, and open only to the people you choose. Everyone else who lands on it sees a simple lock screen instead of your app.

What “private” actually means

When an app is private, only people with the link or the code can open it. Everyone else — anyone who finds the address, guesses the name, or gets a forwarded screenshot — meets a lock screen and goes no further. It’s the whole app that’s hidden, not a single page or a single button.

How to turn it on

It lives in the App tab, right next to where you publish — one switch labeled Make this app private. Flip it on and whacka hands you two ways to let people in, both carrying the same secret:

• An invite link. Send it in a message, and whoever taps it is straight in — nothing to type.
• An access code. Short and easy to read out loud — perfect for someone standing in front of you, or a code you post inside a group.

Whichever they use, their device is remembered, so next time they’re let in quietly instead of being asked again. And if you’d rather give nothing away, you can hide the app’s name and icon on the lock screen too — to a stranger, it reveals nothing at all.

Who makes their app private

Once you can hide an app, you start noticing how many of them were never meant to be public in the first place:

• A family or household app — a shared calendar, a chore board, a trip planner that’s nobody else’s business.
• A class or study group — homework, practice and grades for your students and their parents, and no one else.
• A small team’s tool — the order screen, the daily checklist, the price list your two or three staff run the day on.
• A members-only space — a club, a cohort, a community group where the whole point is that it’s for members.
• A work in progress — something you’re still shaping, shared with a handful of testers before you decide to open it up.

It’s real privacy — not just a hidden link

This is the part that matters. A private app isn’t merely harder to find. The lock is real, and so is the protection behind it. The information inside — what your members entered, what your students submitted — is held shut on our servers, not just tucked behind a screen a curious person could slip past. Hiding the link is the easy half; whacka does the hard half for you, automatically.

You don’t build any of this, either. There’s no password page to design and no “members area” to wire up — you flip one switch and the lock is handled for you.

Changed your mind, or a code got out? Renew it.

A code is a bit like your home Wi-Fi password: handy to share, until it reaches someone it shouldn’t. If that happens — a screenshot travels too far, someone leaves the group — tap Renew. It swaps in a fresh link and code, and everyone (even people already inside) comes back in once with the new one. It’s the clean way to take access back: exactly like changing the Wi-Fi password and telling only the people you still trust.

And turning private off is just as easy. Make it public again whenever you like — your app and everything in it stays untouched.

Private apps vs. staff logins

Two related ideas that are easy to mix up — here’s the quick rule:

• Make it private when you want to hide the whole app from the public and let in a circle of people who all share one way in.
• Use Teams when you want named staff to each have their own login with different roles — a manager who sees everything, a cashier who sees only today’s orders.

Reaching for a members space where everyone’s the same? That’s private. Running something where different people should see different things? That’s Teams.

A few honest notes

As always, the edges, up front:

• Private apps are a Pro and Ultra feature. On the Free and Starter plans you’ll see where it lives and a nudge to upgrade.
• Stop paying and it stays locked, never exposed. If a subscription lapses, a private app doesn’t quietly flip itself public — your hidden app stays hidden. That’s the safe default, on purpose.
• It works on your own domain too. If you’ve put your app on a custom domain, the lock and the invite link work there in exactly the same way.

If you’ve been keeping an idea to yourself because it was only ever meant for a few people — your family, your students, your members — that reason just disappeared. Build it, make it private, and share it with exactly the people it’s for. No one else needs to know it’s there.