What is english-lock-widget?

English Lock Widget is a personal iOS Lock Screen widget built to help someone passively pick up English vocabulary just by unlocking their phone. Every time you unlock your iPhone, the Lock Screen shows a new English word paired with a small icon and a short phrase giving it context, with no translation into another language shown alongside it. The idea behind this comes from a language learning theory called Comprehensible Input, associated with the linguist Stephen Krashen, which holds that people absorb a language most naturally through repeated, meaningful exposure rather than through direct translation and memorization drills. Since most people unlock their phone somewhere between eighty and one hundred fifty times a day, each unlock becomes a small, repeated moment of exposure that adds up over time. Technically, the widget is built using Apple's WidgetKit for an .accessoryRectangular Lock Screen widget, available on iOS 17 and newer. It reads a static words.json file bundled with the app, and each time the system refreshes the widget, it shows one of twelve randomly chosen entries. There is no shared app group and no persistent state tracking which words you have already seen. The icons use Apple's own SF Symbols library rather than full color images, since Lock Screen widgets render everything in a single tint color and photographic images would not display correctly there. The word list itself contains 206 hand-picked words at an intermediate, B1 to B2 level, each checked so its icon maps to the word in a clear, literal way rather than through a stretched metaphor. The project deliberately leaves out spaced repetition, progress tracking, and any kind of scoring, since the goal is passive exposure rather than active study. Notably, the README states this was built in one evening by someone with no prior iOS or Swift development experience, using Claude Code, with the design and planning process included in the repository's documentation folder. Building it requires Xcode and the xcodegen tool, and it is meant to be installed on your own device with a personal Apple ID rather than distributed through the App Store. It is released under the MIT license.