Locket, a new social app that puts live photographs from friends in a widget on your iOS home screen, has raised to the top of the App Store ranks in recent days. In other words, it transforms Apple’s widget system, which is generally used to display information such as news, weather, inspiring quotes, and photographs from your iPhone’s gallery, into a private social networking platform. Matt Moss, a former Apple Worldwide Developer Conference student scholarship recipient and recent UC Santa Barbara graduate, came up with the idea for the app while working on Hawkeye Labs, user research and testing platform.
Locket, he confesses, began as a personal side project rather than his primary emphasis. Moss recalls, “I created it as a present for my girlfriend’s birthday last summer.” “We were ready to start a long-distance relationship since she was going back to school in the autumn,” he says. “Getting a small photo from her on my home screen…seemed incredibly enticing.” It’s just a pleasant method to keep in touch.” The developer spent a week or two developing the software and then spent the next six months using it with his partner, emailing each other an average of five images every day.
Locket became a great way to look back on their images because it also records the photos exchanged and received in its history section. Friends of the couple began to notice and inquire if they might use it with their own significant others, families, or friends. As a result, Moss decided to make Locket available to the public on the App Store. The app was introduced on New Year’s Day, and as of this morning, it had over 2 million users. According to Apptopia’s app store data, Locket became the No. 1 overall app on the U.S. App Store on Sunday, after becoming the No. 1 Social Networking app the day before.
Apptopia claims to have only seen roughly 1 million global installs so far, with about 31% coming from the United States – although their data only goes back to yesterday. Moss attributes Locket’s quick adoption to the app’s viral success on TikTok, where he posted videos to an accompanying Locket company account where he could demonstrate the app in operation. Over the course of a few days, his video gained 100,000 views. Other TikTok users then started constructing their own videos using the software and the special sound from the Locket film.
This allowed TikTok’s young user base to embrace the app even more. In fact, according to Moss, one video created by a TikTok user in the United Kingdom received more than 5 million views in a single day. While it’s usual for app developers to use TikTok to boost installs at launch, Moss claims that no paid influencer marketing took place and that he did not run any paid commercials on TikTok or elsewhere.
Because of its TikTok exposure, Locket remains at the top of the iPhone’s Top Free Apps ranking today — and because its early adopters encouraged their friends to download the app and try it out, resulting in even more installs. To begin using the app, go to the App Store and download Locket, then sign up by validating your phone number.
In order to function, Locket requests access to your iPhone’s Contacts and Camera. Locket should ideally allow users to forgo complete address book access and instead send solo invitations to pals, as this would be a more privacy-conscious method. Moss says he is thinking about modifying this component of the app’s functionality to make it more user-friendly. He claims, however, that Locket neither stores your contact information nor sends out invites using its own phone number; instead, it just opens an iMessage window so you may personalize the text sent to your pals.
