Lock the scroll.
Unlock a language.
LKIN shuts your distracting apps with Apple’s Screen Time — and the only key is a 30-second language session. Three words, and you’re back in.
How it works
Three steps, and the loop runs itself.
No willpower, no timer you can dismiss. iOS holds the door; you hold the key.
Pick what eats your day
Choose apps, whole categories, or websites in Apple’s own picker. Face ID guards the list, so a moment of weakness can’t quietly undo it.
Open one, hit the wall
A shield appears instead of the feed: “It can wait 30 seconds — your French can’t.” It’s enforced by iOS, so it holds even if LKIN isn’t running.
Learn three words, walk through
A short session — see it, solve it, use it — and every locked app opens at once for the window you chose. Then it relocks itself.
Try it — right here
This is the actual unlock.
Real words from the app’s real packs, in any of the 22 languages. Flip the card, then put the sentence back together. That’s the whole price of admission.
Step one · Learn
Step two · Build the sentence
The tiles here are cut by the app’s own tokenizer, not by looking for spaces — which is why Japanese and Chinese work at all: not one of their 41 sentences per pack contains a single space. 880 of the 902 sentences across all 22 languages make a playable puzzle; the few too short to order stay as multiple choice in the app instead.
Languages
22 languages. And 462 ways to pair them.
Every language works in both directions — one you speak, one you learn. A Tamil speaker can learn Japanese with the meanings shown in Tamil, not routed through English.
11 global
11 Indian
141 items each — no thin ports
71 words, 29 phrases and 41 full sentences per language, across the same 12 units. Every single one carries a worked example sentence with its own translation.
1,167 strings, translated 21 times
Word meanings, quiz options and example translations all render in the language you already speak. Quizzes never mix scripts — options are dropped and refilled rather than shown half in English.
868 letters across 22 writing systems
Devanagari, Hangul, kana, Arabic, Tamil, Odia and more — each letter with its romanization, a pronunciation hint, and a speaker that reads it aloud properly rather than mangling a bare glyph.
The lock
Real Screen Time blocking, not a nagging reminder.
LKIN writes an actual Screen Time shield through FamilyControls. There is no “open anyway” button, no snooze, and no way for LKIN to see what you locked.
It holds when the app is closed
Relocking is armed as a system activity, so the shield comes back even if LKIN was killed. Apps, whole categories and websites are all fair game.
15 minutes to the rest of the day
Pick what an unlock buys you — 15 min, 30 min, an hour, or through to midnight — and how many words it costs, anywhere from 1 to 25. Three is the default.
A 24-hour cooldown on your own escape hatch
Turn it on and the lock list freezes: no edits, no 24-hour break. Turning it back off takes a full day to land, so the version of you that wants out at 11pm can’t just flip a switch.
Six doors, one gate
Changing the locked apps, ending a window early, editing the schedule, taking a break — all behind Face ID. Turning the requirement off has to pass it too.
Or always on, which is the default
Set an hourly window — 9 to 21, or overnight — and locks apply only inside it. Leave it off and they simply never lift on their own.
The Dynamic Island holds your timer
Your unlock window runs as a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Island, with a draining bar and the apps still waiting. It surfaces near the end rather than sitting there all day.
The learning
A session you can finish standing at a crosswalk.
Ten cards for a default three-word unlock — and the scheduler is honest about what you actually knew.
See it
The illustration fills the card, the word sits under it, and the meaning is blurred until you tap — so there is visibly something to uncover. It’s spoken aloud as it lands.
Solve it — and sentences are different
A word gets four meanings to choose from. A sentence comes back as its own words, shuffled, for you to put in order — because order is the thing a sentence actually teaches.
Use it
Every one of the 3,102 items ends inside a real example sentence, translated into the language you speak. Coverage is total — there is no item without one.
1, 2, 6, 14, 35 days
An SM-2 scheduler with four states and a per-word ease factor. Five clean answers take a word to Mastered; a miss resets the interval and drops the ease.
Only a first-try answer counts
Get it wrong and fix it, and the word is still scheduled as a miss. Reveal the answer and it counts as a miss too — but without the buzz. You asked; we told you.
12 stages, 3 levels, one test each
Greetings through Work & Study, gated by a 10-question test at 80% to pass. Plus a Basics shelf for the alphabet, numbers and emergencies.
The art
147 hand-drawn scenes, and a cast you’ll recognise.
Every word is a picture, not a stock photo — a 1980s Tokyo slice-of-life look with an original cast: ROBO, a round mint robot with a red antenna, and the friends he follows around town. Because the packs mirror each other item for item, one drawing serves all 22 languages.
Widgets
20 widgets. Nine you can actually play.
Not screenshots of your streak — real App Intent widgets that flip cards, mark answers and save words without ever opening the app. Drag the row.
Practice board
The whole flip-card loop on your Home Screen: a big illustration, the word, and Reveal / Next / bookmark as real buttons.
InteractiveQuiz board
A picture asks, four tappable meanings answer. The right answer is always shown afterwards, even when you miss.
InteractiveMatch the pairs
Three words down the left, their meanings jumbled on the right, a live score, and an Again button. A real game, on the Home Screen.
InteractiveToday board
Streak, words due, and the day’s progress — with the next card one tap away.
InteractiveFlip card
Tap to reveal the meaning, tap again for the next word. The smallest possible study loop.
InteractiveQuick quiz
One word, two meanings, instant feedback — a five-second check on the way past.
InteractiveSave a word
One tap files the current word into your saved library, waiting for you next time you open LKIN.
InteractiveWord photo & Word scene
The illustration at full bleed with the word over it. Eleven of the twenty widgets carry the real art.
Word gallery
Up to six words at once in a picture grid — a glanceable revision sheet.
Streak ring, Word, Word inline
Three accessory widgets: a streak ring, three lines beside the clock, and a single line above it.
A new word every hour — or on your clock
Sixty minutes is the default; you can ask for 30 minutes, 2 hours, 6 hours, once a day, or any custom pace down to 15 minutes. Every widget agrees on the same word at the same moment.
Pick what they draw from
Current stage, saved words, words you’ve learned, or the whole library. A widget is never allowed to sit blank.
A Widgets tab that runs the real thing
The gallery renders the actual widget code at true iOS canvas sizes, so what you swipe through in the app is pixel-for-pixel what lands on your Home Screen.
Privacy
We can’t see what you lock. Not by policy — by construction.
Screen Time hands apps to LKIN as opaque tokens. The app can’t read a name or a bundle id out of them, and it never uploads them.
Your locked-app list, always
The selection is written to one place — a local app-group store on your iPhone. It appears in no cloud payload anywhere in the app.
Even the icons aren’t ours
Locked apps are drawn by the system out-of-process. LKIN passes a token and gets pixels back; it never learns the app.
Never reaches the app either
“Your most used this week” is drawn inside Apple’s own sandbox. The data can’t cross out — which is also why you can’t tap a row there to lock it.
Because there’s no tracking
LKIN ships no App Tracking Transparency code and asks for no advertising identifier. You will never see that dialog from us.
Sign in with Apple, or don’t
It’s the only sign-in method and it’s optional — onboarding offers “Skip for now”. Sign in and your streak and progress follow you to a new phone.
Delete everything from inside the app
Settings › Your data wipes your cloud records and your sign-in, and clears the device in the same step. No email, no waiting.
Full detail in the Privacy Policy.
Pricing
The lock is free. Forever.
All 22 languages, the whole curriculum and every setting are in the free app. Pro removes limits and ads — it doesn’t hold the language hostage.
- Lock up to 3 apps, categories or websites
- All 22 languages, all 141 items each
- All 12 stages, by passing each stage’s test
- Any unlock window and 1–25 words per unlock
- Every widget and the Live Activity countdown
- No daily limit, no hearts, no energy meter
- Voice calls with Chloe, 10 minutes per short ad
- A small banner, and an optional ad to reveal an answer
- Unlimited locked apps, categories and websites
- Strict mode, with its 24-hour cooldown
- Jump to any stage and skip the tests
- Practise from the whole pack, not just unlocked stages
- 2 streak freezes a month, applied automatically
- Reveal an answer instantly, with no ad
- No ads anywhere
- Unlimited calls with Chloe, plus a report after each
- 11 alternate app icons
Prices shown are US App Store prices; your own storefront and currency are what you’ll actually see. Subscriptions renew until cancelled and can be managed or cancelled any time in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions. Terms · Privacy
Questions
The things people ask first.
Can I get around the lock?
Not from the shield — there is no “open anyway”, no snooze and no emergency bypass. You can always change your own lock list or take a 24-hour break from inside LKIN, because a lock you genuinely can’t undo is a lock nobody would trust. Strict mode is there for when you want that door to take a full day to open.
Does one session unlock everything, or just one app?
Everything, at once. One session lifts every shield for the window you chose — apps, categories and websites together. Unlocking one app at a time would turn a 30-second habit into a toll booth.
Do I have to start from zero if I already speak some of it?
Pro users can jump straight to any of the 12 stages. On free, each stage opens by passing a 10-question test at 80% — so you can test out of what you know rather than grinding through it.
What happens if I switch languages?
Nothing is lost. Progress is stored per word with the language baked into the id, so you can run several pairs in parallel and pick each one up exactly where you left it.
Is my Screen Time data sent anywhere?
No. Your locked-app selection lives only on your iPhone, and your usage report is drawn inside Apple’s sandbox where the app can’t reach it. What does sync — only if you sign in — is your learning progress: streak, settings, saved words and session history.
Does it work without an account or a connection?
Yes. Every language pack, illustration and example ships inside the app. An account is optional and exists to carry your progress to a new phone.
Which iPhone do I need?
iOS 26 or later. Screen Time locking needs Apple’s Family Controls, which is iPhone-only — there is no iPad or Mac version yet.
How do I cancel?
Settings › your name › Subscriptions on your iPhone, any time. Cancelling keeps Pro until the period you already paid for runs out, and the free app keeps working after that.
Your apps are still there.
They just cost three words now.
Free on the App Store. The lock stays free forever.