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English, before you unlock.
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A simple choice. A stronger habit.
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Four useful phrases. Ready when you are.
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Your learning, right on time.
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A study space that feels like you.
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See both sides. Stay organized.
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Your time. Your pace.
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A useful phrase, right where you look.
Inspiration
Learning vocabulary usually fails in the gaps between study sessions. I wanted to make those small moments useful without turning the lock screen into another distracting feed.
Lockeigo turns the phrases you personally want to remember into a quiet recall habit. Instead of giving every learner the same course, it lets people create their own English cards and brings one back at the moment they are most likely to see it: on their Lock Screen.
What it does
Users can create English cards with translations and optional example sentences, organize them into folders, and import or export decks as JSON.
When a user explicitly starts Lock Screen mode, Lockeigo shows selected cards through a Live Activity. The learner can reveal the meaning, save a card, add it to Review, or move on to the next phrase. Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets provide a lighter, fixed-display alternative.
Inside the app, Review uses simple Again and Got It decisions to support spaced repetition. The app also includes reminders, themes, presentation controls, and a Plus plan for unlimited cards, advanced review, extra customization, and ad-free use.
How we built it
Lockeigo is a native iPhone app built with Swift and SwiftUI.
- ActivityKit powers the Live Activity and Dynamic Island experience.
- WidgetKit keeps widgets aligned with the app's selected cards and visual settings.
- Learning cards and review history stay on-device in an App Group.
- A privacy-conscious Azure backend supports only the Live Activity flow that the user explicitly enables.
- RevenueCat and StoreKit 2 power Lockeigo Plus monthly and annual subscriptions.
- The free experience may show ads only inside eligible app screens. Ads never appear on the Lock Screen, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, widgets, notifications, review cards, or Plus screens.
Challenges
The hardest challenge was making a Live Activity feel useful without making it intrusive.
A lock-screen experience must remain reliable across locking, unlocking, app restarts, token rotation, and system-driven Activity termination. We built the remote delivery path around explicit opt-in, short-lived processing, signed synchronization, and careful handling of ActivityKit token changes.
Monetization needed the same care. We designed Plus around a clear value exchange: users can keep learning for free, while Plus unlocks larger libraries, deeper review tools, customization, reminders, and an ad-free experience. RevenueCat lets us keep entitlement state and StoreKit purchase flows consistent across the app.
What we learned
We learned that a polished mobile app is more than a feature list. The details matter: keeping cards readable on the Lock Screen, avoiding ads in moments of learning, handling purchase restoration clearly, and making privacy boundaries understandable.
Most importantly, we learned to build around a small habit. Lockeigo is not trying to replace a full language course. It helps learners remember one useful phrase at a time, wherever their phone already meets them.
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