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The latest hot photo-sharing app, Locket, recently raised $12.5 million in funding, making it potentially worth checking out even though it’s still relatively unknown. After launching on New Year’s Day this year, it did rack up over 20 million downloads, but it’s still nowhere as well-known as its peers, Instagram or BeReal. (Instagram, of course, has been pivoting to video-sharing, while BeReal has remained firmly committed to one-daily, unfiltered photos.) But what makes Locket different?
What’s Locket?
Locket lets you take pictures and send them directly to your friends’ mobile home screens. For that to work, you and your friends must:
- Download the app (which is called “Locket Widget” in the App Store)
- Add each other on the app
- Add the widget to your home screen
You can’t progress in the app without adding the widget to your home screen, but that is the whole point. And if none of your friends are on Locket, you’ll have to convince them to get it. (One of my friends had issues adding the widget to their home screen; another downloaded it after I sent my referral link and asked no questions; yet another responded, “Please, God, no. I already ignore BeReal.” Yes, I am the person who forced her to download BeReal.)
The whole point of this app is to send photos of yourself directly to someone’s home screen for them to view when they open their phone. If your friends aren’t aligned, it won’t work.
How do you use Locket?
Once you have friends added, you can take real-time photos and send them directly to their home screens. You can’t edit the photos at all, there are no AR filters or overlays, and you can’t add photos from your existing camera roll. It’s just real-time pics, taken either with your front or back camera. (In that way, it’s quite similar to BeReal.)
You can select which people on your friends list get the pictures, too. You can send the photo to a group of friends or just one person; and you can add multiple Locket widgets to your home screen, too, if you want a dedicated spot for your “crush” or “best friend” to flood with photos, while another Locket widget can show you photos from everyone else. As your friends send photos to your Locket, those pics will appear in the widgets on your screen, so you’ll see them when you open your phone or navigate around to other apps.
Should you download the Locket Widget app?
Locket is available for download on the App Store and Google Play, but you don’t need it in the same way you didn’t need BeReal or Dimensional. Still, in the few minutes I played around on the app with G/O Media producer Justin Rodriguez and Gizmodo’s Kevin Hurler, I had a fun enough time. If more of my friends end up downloading it, I can see us spending a few days spamming each other with ugly selfies or inappropriate photos, but ultimately forgetting about it. Essentially, this is like a more intimate, grown-up version of Snapchat and a more evolving version of BeReal: You can share what you’re doing at a given moment with your friends without editing anything or putting too much thought into it.
from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/3Qutzhm
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