Lock&Stock app for students launches in Pakistan

An app that encourages the digital well-being of students by incentivizing them to keep off their smartphones.

Lock&Stock, a free mobile application that encourages the digital well-being of students by incentivizing them to keep off their smartphones has launched ground operations in Pakistan.

The app rewards students with a ‘key’ every minute they lock their smartphones and use those keys to avail discounts food, leisure, and retail brands, secure scholarships, or apply for jobs and internships to organisation.

Since its inception in the UAE back in 2017, over 50,000 students have spent a combined 558 years offline.

“Digital addiction among students is on the rise with especially 16-18-year-olds spending hundreds of hours glued to their smartphones. Our brand purpose is to improve the lives of students and we aim to fight digital addiction among students from around the world”, said Craig Fernandes, CoFounder, and CEO of Lock&Stock.

Fernander, who got the idea of the app while in an Economics lecture during his time at the University of Iowa, back in early 2017.

The main goal is to track the amount of time students spend away from their devices and to block social media notifications so that students can redirect their attention to doing something more productive.

To keep students engaged in the whole process they compete among one another on a leaderboard and top-performing users are given a weekly prize.

The application also allows students to add their friends to a custom leaderboard to compete against each other.

“It's been an incredible journey thus far, starting out has a humble startup with a mission to combat phone addiction in the classroom to become the largest education marketplace in the UAE. We launch our operations in Pakistan on the 15th of September - that's just a week before our 3 year anniversary!” said Mustafa Ahmed, CTO of Lock&Stock and a proud Pakistani national.

The tech-startup launched a scholarship platform built into the application allowing students to access a network of over 400 universities from around the world.

These universities provide students with fee waivers and bursaries in exchange for students keeping away from their digital devices.

In 2019 alone, Lock&Stock students secured over half a million dollars in various scholarships and fee waivers through the application. This year, students have secured over a million dollars in scholarships for their September enrollments.

Lock&Stock is available to download for free from the Google Play Store and App Store.

Published in The Express Tribune, Tech Desk , October 24th, 2020.