I've seen a few other posts about creating parental controls using MDM Profiles to prevent other devices from opening certain apps:
- How to do Parent Control App in iOS?
- Is it possible to write a parental control app for iOS?
- https://kidslox.com/
Would it be possible to use this method to allows the user to prevent access to their own apps on their own device?
If what you are asking is if you can externally lock certain apps on a device, then you would most likely need the apps of which you are locking to have some sort of support for the parental controls app. Something like external whitelisting of Apple ID's.
This is because as of iOS 10, the structure of the system doesn't allow one app tamper with another, unless permissions are given, which makes sense. Nobody wants their app to be tampered with by a random person.
To put it bluntly, in theory, this is possible, but only if the app that the person wants to lock gives permission. Other apps wouldn't work.