Locked (NowLocked) vs Brick

Locked and Brick are almost the same product: a physical tag you tap to unlock your apps. The real gap between them is price, shipping and which phone you carry.

By Ruslan Shchuchkin, who built PhoneStop · Last checked September 2026 · Read this page as Markdown

The short version

Choose Locked if you are on iPhone and want to pay less. It does what Brick does, for a lower one-time price, with free worldwide shipping. For an iPhone user the saving is the whole argument.

Choose Brick if you are on Android, or want the original. Brick works on both platforms and has the longer track record; Locked is iPhone-only.

They are close enough that, on iPhone, this comes down to price and shipping rather than the experience.

How each one stops you

Both are the same design: a passive tag plus the operating system's blocking. Your chosen apps stay gone until you physically tap the tag, which you are meant to keep out of easy reach. Locked runs on iPhone through Apple's Screen Time API; Brick runs on iPhone and Android. Neither keeps a running total of your time, and neither warns you as a day fills up, because that is not what a tap-to-lock tag does.

Where Locked (NowLocked) wins

• Cheaper, a lower one-time price than Brick.
• Free worldwide shipping, with no surprise import fees.
• The same tap-to-unlock behaviour as Brick.

Where Brick wins

• iPhone and Android, where Locked is iPhone-only.
• The longer track record and larger community.
• A single, well-known product with wide support.

Shopping for the cheaper tag is not the same as changing the habit

When two products are this alike, the comparison quietly becomes a price check, and a price check is not the decision that matters. Whether a tag works for you depends on the room you leave it in and the day you forget it, not on which one shipped cheaper. And whichever you pick, the phone is still open for everything you did not lock, and neither tag can tell you how long you were on it.

PhoneStop measures the thing the tags cannot: the total. One budget for the whole phone, counting down as you use any app, with a stop when it runs out and no object to buy, carry or forget. Free on Android, iPhone coming. The cheaper tag saves you money; a budget changes what you are actually watching.

Disclosure: we make PhoneStop, so treat our own entry with the scepticism it deserves. Everything else here is written from public information and hands-on use; prices and platforms were checked in September 2026 and change often, so check the vendor before you pay.