secure_text_widget

A Flutter widget that renders text so it is excluded from iOS screenshots, screen recordings, AirPlay mirroring and the App Switcher preview — while staying a normal-looking Text in the UI.

See it in action

What the user sees on screen What actually lands in the screenshot
SecureText showing the value on the live screen SecureText is blank in the captured screenshot
SecureText renders the value normally, like any Text. The same SecureText is completely blank in the capture.

How it works

Flutter draws everything through its own engine (Skia/Impeller), so no Flutter widget can be selectively hidden from iOS screen capture. To get around that, SecureText:

  1. Embeds a real native UIView in the Flutter tree via UiKitView.
  2. That view hosts a hidden UITextField with isSecureTextEntry = true.
  3. A UILabel is inserted into the text field's private secure canvas (_UITextLayoutCanvasView). iOS automatically masks the contents of that canvas out of any screen-capture pipeline.

No private APIs are called — only the private subview hierarchy is walked, and this has been stable across iOS 13 → 26.

Usage

import 'package:secure_text_widget/secure_text_widget.dart';

SecureText(
  '4242 4242 4242 4242',
  style: TextStyle(fontSize: 22, fontWeight: FontWeight.w600),
)

The API mirrors Text: data, style, textAlign, maxLines, textDirection, softWrap. Layout matches what a plain Text would produce (text is measured with a TextPainter and the native view is pinned to that box).

Style updates flow through a per-view MethodChannel — changing data, style or textAlign does not recreate the native view, so there is no flicker.

Platform support

Platform Behaviour
iOS 13+ Native secure rendering — invisible on screenshot / recording / AirPlay / App Switcher.
Android Falls back to a plain Text. Android has no per-view capture masking — protect the whole screen instead (see below).
Web, desktop Falls back to a plain Text.

See also: screen_protector

SecureText is intentionally narrow — it hides only the text it wraps, only on iOS. For anything beyond that, pair it with screen_protector:

  • Android — this widget does nothing there, so use screen_protector to set FLAG_SECURE and block screenshots / recordings for the whole screen.
  • iOS, non-text content — SecureText can only mask text drawn through its native secure canvas. To protect images, charts, custom-painted widgets, or an entire sensitive screen, use screen_protector to secure the whole app window (and blur/black it out in the App Switcher).

Rule of thumb: SecureText for a single line that must stay in the layout as normal text; screen_protector for whole-screen or non-text protection and for Android coverage. They compose cleanly — use both when you need fine-grained iOS text masking and broad cross-platform coverage.

Limitations

  • Transforms / opacity < 1 on UiKitView can be lossy — keep the widget in a straightforward layout.
  • Font families must be already registered with iOS (bundled in the runner or shipped through Flutter's asset system). Unknown families fall back to the system font.
  • If Apple ever renames or removes the private secure-canvas subview, the widget will keep rendering (via a fallback code path) but the screenshot masking will no longer apply. There is no way to detect that programmatically — pin the plugin version and test on new iOS majors.

Example

See example/ for a running app with buttons that mutate text/size/color so you can verify live updates and take a screenshot to confirm the SecureText line disappears while the regular Text stays visible.

Libraries

secure_text_widget