How Locket, a widget built by a guy as a gift to his girlfriend became an Apple App Store Award winner

In the summer of 2021, Matt Moss was looking for a way to stay in touch with his girlfriend.

Moss had just graduated with a degree in computer science from the University of California, Santa Barbara; his girlfriend, Ava, wasn’t done with school yet, meaning their relationship was now becoming long-distance. As a birthday present, he created a digital locket widget that could live on both of their home screens, allowing the pair to send each other pictures throughout the day. And then, as often happens on a college campus, word got around.

“Even though it was just a private app for the two of us, originally, Ava started showing the app to our friends and they would all ask where they could download it,” he says. “For a while we’d have to turn these people away and say, ‘No, this is just, you know, a private thing’.”

Eventually, Moss was convinced, and by August 2022, Moss had built a company around the app—called, appropriately enough, Locket—and raised $12.5 million in funding from notable names such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

“The thing that [early users] all seemed to really love was that the app was just dedicated to those five or 10 people that they really care about,” Moss says. “That’s significant. Other best friends, family, people like that. I started to realize that even though there are a lot of these bigger social networking apps out there, these platforms are really designed for sharing content with hundreds of people at once.”

The premise behind Locket is fairly simple: The widget lives on your phone’s home screen, displaying pictures sent from up to 20 close friends and family members in near real-time. There are no filters and no effects. It is, in some ways, BeReal without the time blocks. Moss sees it as a way to stay in contact with the people who matter the most to you.

Earlier this week, Locket was named one of five Cultural Impact winners in the 2022 App Store Awards, apps and widgets that “encourage users to engage more deeply with their emotions, authentically connect with others,” per Apple, “and pay homage to their heritage and the generations that came before them while envisioning how to create a better world today”. But it was a winner with users long before that.

Since launching on New Year’s Day of 2022, Locket has seen over 30 million signups, with nearly 2 billion photos sent between users so far. Much of that growth can be attributed to TikTok. After the launch, Moss made a TikTok video showing how the app worked. That went viral and the app was downloaded millions of times in the first week. 

Those users, in turn, made videos of their own highlighting Locket, which caused it to become a global success.

“We have tons of users in the U.S. but also places like Saudi Arabia and Thailand and the UK and, and lots of other places as well,” says Moss.

With the funding, Locket has since grown to a 10-person team. The app is not monetized so far, but that’s something the company is looking into now. New features are being added, as well, like the addition of captions a few months ago. Holiday frames rolled out last month. And up next? Messaging.

Don’t expect the growth to be too fast and furious, though. Locket knows a big part of its appeal is its simplicity.

“One of the things people dislike the most about a lot of social networking apps is that they have like a million features,” says Moss. “[You] don’t know what you’re actually supposed to be doing on the app and it feels very cluttered. So simplicity is definitely what we want to focus on.”