Motion Lock: Automatically Block Apps When You Move

Stop Scrolling When You Start Moving

You check something on the way out. You keep reading in the corridor. You are still reading when you reach the street, and the street has been going on without you.

Nobody decides to do this. It is the same gesture as any other scroll, except that the world has started moving around you while you do it. And no daily allowance can help, because an allowance does not know whether you are sitting on your sofa or walking away from your front door.

Motion lock does one thing. When you start moving, your blocked apps close, and you get your head back.

Automatic App Blocking Based on Movement

Motion lock is one of the two protections that ask nothing of you — which is the only way it could work, because nobody decides to keep reading while crossing a road. Delay Lock is the other of that kind, for the reflex that opens an app while you are sitting still.

The two that do run on a decision are Schedule and the Express widget: the evening you blocked out last week, and the tap you make when you catch yourself. Those run on a choice. This one runs on the fact that you never made one.

How Motion Lock Detects Movement

It waits for a real move — about five metres — and it waits to be sure.

Upchin watches movement and location together, and only counts a sample when the distance covered is larger than the margin of error on that same measurement. Indoors, GPS routinely drifts by fifteen metres while the phone sits perfectly still on a table. A naive five-metre threshold would lock you out in your own kitchen; requiring the movement to exceed the uncertainty is what prevents that.

Several consecutive credible samples are needed before anything happens. The result is a lock that fires when you walk, and stays quiet when you do not.

When it fires, it starts the same block as the widget, with the same Upchin screen.

How to Turn On Motion Lock

1. Tap the Motion orb on the home screen.
2. Turn the toggle on, and allow location access when iOS asks.

That is the whole setup. There is no schedule to configure and no distance to tune: Motion lock is either on or off, and when it is on it applies to the apps you have already chosen in the Selection tab — the same list every other protection uses.

If you do not grant location, the toggle will not stay on. Upchin does not show a protection as active when it cannot actually work.

Why Motion Lock Needs Background Location Access

This is the part to read before you decide.

Motion lock needs the Always location permission, not “While Using the App”. The reason is mechanical: iOS suspends apps that are not on screen, and a suspended app cannot be told that you have started walking. “While Using” would mean Motion lock only worked while you were already looking at Upchin — which is exactly when you do not need it.

Having the permission is not the same as using it all the time. Motion lock does not listen in the background. It wakes only when you open one of your blocked apps, checks location and movement for a few seconds, and stops — as soon as you leave the app, or as soon as it sees you are not moving. The rest of the time, nothing is listening.

So it does not cost you battery: it saves some. A few seconds of location is one of the cheapest things a phone does; video on a bright screen is one of the most expensive. Every block that stops a few minutes of video saves far more than Motion lock ever spends.

The permission is deliberate for a second reason too: a protection that silently fails to arm is worse than no protection at all.

What Upchin does with that location is narrow, and worth stating plainly: brief GPS checks to confirm a short move before locking. No route tracking. No advertising. Your motion data stays on your phone and is purged at every trigger cycle — your location never leaves your iPhone.

One consequence to expect: iOS will periodically ask whether you want to keep allowing background location. That is normal, it happens to every app with this permission, and it does not mean anything has gone wrong.

If you would rather not grant it, turn Motion lock off. No other protection uses location.

Limitations of Movement-Based App Blocking

It is not a tracker. It does not record where you went and it has no idea where you are. It knows only that the distance between two moments was larger than the error on the measurement.

It is not a walking detector. It reacts to displacement, so a car, a bus or a train will trigger it too. If you are often a passenger and that does not suit you, Motion lock is probably not the protection for you — the others do not move with you.

It is not a trap. A block it starts ends like any other: the Back IRL button stops it in one tap.

It does nothing on its own. Motion lock blocks the apps you selected. If that list is empty, there is nothing for it to close, and the toggle will say so instead of pretending.