hodgepodge vs Locket: the moment, or the whole day.
written by the hodgepodge team (well, brett)4 min read
I want to start by saying Locket is a genuinely sweet idea. A little photo widget on your home screen, and when one of your best friends sends a photo, it just appears there. No feed to scroll. Emoji reactions instead of like counts. Up to 20 friends, on purpose, so it stays close. Your phone’s most valuable real estate, handed over to the people you love. Whoever thought of that deserves a long vacation somewhere warm.
So this is not a “which app is good” piece. Both apps are chasing the same feeling (the scattered-people problem, the ache of it) from two different directions. Locket sends a moment. hodgepodge keeps a day. That difference sounds small and turns out to be everything.
Locket is presence. A photo lands on your home screen and for one second your person is standing next to you: here’s my dog, here’s my parking lot, thinking of you. It asks almost nothing of anyone. It’s photos only, though, and mostly now. The app bundles your pictures into monthly recap videos, but the texture of a particular Tuesday (what you were doing, what you kept putting off, what you thought about it) isn’t really what it’s built to hold.
a photo is a moment. a day has plot.
hodgepodge is after the day itself, in three small parts. The tasks you’re actually doing, one photo, one thought. Which means your people don’t just see that you exist, they see what your day was made of:
The train was twenty minutes out, so I got a pastry. The system works.
And it adds up. Every check-in becomes a page in a record you can scroll back through: the photo, the list, the thing you couldn’t stop thinking about. Your people’s days stack up next to yours, you leave comments about the returns that survived another week, and six months later March is still there, whole. A moment is lovely. A record is a relationship.
locket sends a moment. hodgepodge keeps the day.
| Locketthe moment | hodgepodgethe whole day | |
|---|---|---|
| what you share | A live photo, straight to your friends' home screens. | Tasks, one photo, one thought. The day, in three small parts. |
| where it lands | A widget on the home screen, instantly. | A quiet feed of your people's days. No algorithm. |
| who's there | Up to 20 close friends. | The people you mutually add: a partner, a few friends, or just you to start. |
| what accumulates | Monthly recap videos of the photos you've traded. | A scrollable record of every day you checked in. |
| price | Free, with an optional Locket Gold subscription. | Free. |
| pick it if | You want zero-effort delight on the home screen, and photos are enough. | You want the texture: the errands, the thoughts, the record. |
details from Locket's own App Store listing, july 2026
pick Locket if
Honestly, pick Locket if photos are your love language and effort is the enemy. If the thing you miss is the ambient feeling of someone thinking of you at 2pm, a widget that lights up with their face is a beautiful, nearly frictionless answer. hodgepodge asks for slightly more (two minutes, some typing) and if that’s two minutes more than your group will ever give, Locket will fit them better.
pick hodgepodge if
Pick hodgepodge if you want to know what their day actually was, not just what it looked like for one second. If the dentist appointment sitting unchecked for four days is exactly the kind of thing you want to gently text someone about. If you want all of it to add up to something you can reread in December and feel the year again. That last part is the one I couldn’t find anywhere else, so I built it.
Also, quietly: nothing stops you from running both. The widget for the jolt of “thinking of you.” The journal for the slow record of who you both are. Moments are great. I just wanted the days too.