When our teammate Owen wrote about a new way to add Snapchat friends via QR codes, he woke up the next morning to some 200,000+ friend requests. While it’s unlikely that he’ll receive thousands of messages a day from his new buds, if you’ve amassed a sizeable friends list on any messaging apps, you know the feeling of not being able to get through them all in a timely manner. This causes the message to lose its ‘in the moment’ value overtime.

Enters ScreenPop – a new Android app from the team behind lockscreen app Locket. With ScreenPop, users can send picture messages straight to their recipient’s lockscreen, allowing them to view the photos without ever unlocking their phone.

To start, users can drag left to the camera button to snap a picture. Then, they can edit the image with text or drawings before sending it off to anyone from their friends list. The recipient will then see this image the next time they wake their phone up, and can drag left to reply with another image or right to unlock the phone and clear the photo.

If you receive multiple messages while your phone was asleep, the most recent message will appear first. You can scroll through your lockscreen to view all the images received, but if you unlock your phone before viewing all the received messages, the most recently unseen photo will appear the next time you see your lockscreen.

Although the image takes up most of the screen’s real estate, the top bar remains so you will still see push notification icons, network and battery status at the top.

Yunha Kim, CEO of Locket and ScreenPop, says the idea of ScreenPop came when she noticed a teenager receive so many messages from various apps that they weren’t all being opened. Sending images directly to the lockscreen means you have to look at it before unlocking the phone. In its beta launch, Kim says users were sending as many as 40 photos daily.

Kim says ScreenPop does not monitor app usage for NSFW content, so it will be up to the user’s discretion to view images in private if they’re anticipating a juicy message. Of course, this opens the gate for potentially embarrassing moments, so use the app wisely if you’ve got friends who are into passing along, um, interesting photos.

ScreenPop is available for free today on the Play Store.

➤ ScreenPop

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