SGP Technologies, SA, the creators of Blackphone, a privacy-first smartphone, , have announced that they will launch their own app store to serve users concerned about privacy and security. Set to open in January 2015, the Blackphone app store will feature apps vetted by a team of security experts.

“We’ll have a few degrees of vetting,” Blackphone chief executive Toby Weir-Jones told the Guardian. “We’ll validate that the apps will do what they intend – call it the Apple model.”

Blackphone, the product of a partnership between Silent Circle and hardware manufacturer Geeksphone, is a smartphone which helps users keep their personal and work information secure. The Blackphone runs PrivatOS, a heavily customized Android-based operating system, and features a suite of pre-installed propriety apps to secure calls, video chats, texts, file transfers and contact storage.

Although built on Android, Blackphone does not have access to Google’s Play Store, but gets apps from Amazon’s app store instead. This may well be to users advantage since, unlike Apple, Google doesn’t vet apps, which means Google Play has more apps, but is open to malware.

Blackphone is optimistic that its private app store will spur on innovation among app creators and deliver tangible solutions to corporate users and consumers alike.

“But we’re not intending to replicate a mass-market app store right now,” said Weir-Jones. “We’re not going to do games or have our own versions of social network apps. We’re much more interested in a private marketplace with quality apps with things that have a broad alignment with our privacy and security focus.”

In addition to the app store, Blackphone will also roll out a new feature called ‘Spaces’, powered by Graphite Software’s OS-level virtualization software. This new feature will allow users to separate their work and private data on their phone. A user could have two or more ‘Spaces’ on one phone, each containing a set of apps and related data. The apps won’t interact or exchange data in any way, effectively separating the data sets. The neat part is that a user can seamlessly switch between ‘Spaces’ without having to reboot the phone.

Blackphone has not revealed how many phones it has sold since its launch in June, but Weir-Jones told the Gaurdian that he expects the majority of their customers to come from the enterprise space. “But those people also tend to be quite influential – they go home and talk to friends and family about their devices,” he said.

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