Locket, an app for sharing photos to friends’ homescreens, hits the top of the App Store
A new social app, Locket, popped to the top of the App Store charts in recent days thanks to its clever premise to put live photos from friends in a widget on your iOS homescreen. In other words, it turns Apple’s widget system — typically used to showcase information like news, weather, inspirational quotes or photos from your own iPhone’s gallery — into a private social networking platform.
The idea for the app was dreamed up by Matt Moss, a former Apple Worldwide Developer Conference student scholarship winner and recent UC Santa Barbara grad, who had been building a user research and testing platform called Hawkeye Labs.
“I built it as a present for my girlfriend for her birthday last summer,” Moss explains. “She was going back to school in the fall, so we were about to start a long-distance relationship,” he says. “The process of getting a little photo from her on my homescreen…seemed really appealing. Just a nice way to stay in touch.”
The developer build the app over a week or two and ended up using it with his girlfriend fairly extensively over the past six months, sending each other an average of five photos per day. As Locket also stores the photos sent and received in its history section, the app became a fun way to look back on their photos, as well.
