Earn your screen time back.
VerbKey keeps Instagram, TikTok — whatever pulls you in — behind a short verb drill. Get the conjugations right, get your minutes. Spanish, English and French.
For iPhone · Free to download
🇪🇸 Español·🇬🇧 English·🇫🇷 Français
Unlock · 2 of 8
Ayer no ____ venir a la fiesta.
poder · pretérito · yo
You don't need another app telling you to use your phone less. You need the four seconds before you open Instagram to be worth something.
How it works
Three steps, then it runs itself.
Pick what to gate
Choose the apps that eat your day. VerbKey shields them using Apple's own Screen Time system, so the block holds even if you force-quit VerbKey or restart your phone.
Drill the verbs
Tap a gated app and you get a short set of questions instead — conjugation, listening, and speaking, drawn from the verbs you personally keep getting wrong.
Earn your minutes
Finish the set and your apps unlock for a set window. When the time is spent the shield comes back, and every day starts fresh.
Languages
The 100 verbs that actually carry a conversation.
Not vocabulary lists. VerbKey drills the irregular verbs intermediate learners recognise but still fumble when they have to produce them — across past, present and future.
Why it works
The habit is already there. Point it somewhere.
Breaks the reflex
The reach for your phone is automatic. A question you have to actually think about interrupts it — and half the time you put the phone down instead.
Spaced repetition, not streaks
Every verb you miss comes back sooner; every one you nail comes back later. The app tracks what you've mastered so the drills stay on the edge of what you know.
Nothing leaves your phone
Which apps you gate, how often you open them, every answer you give — all of it stays on your device. There is no account, and no server to leak it.
Privacy
I can't see your apps. Neither can Apple.
VerbKey is built on Apple's Family Controls framework. When you pick apps to gate, Apple hands the app an opaque token — not a list of names. Even as the developer, I cannot tell which apps you chose, how long you spend in them, or how you answered a single question. That isn't a policy promise; it's how the system is built.
I built VerbKey because I'd spent years at an intermediate plateau in a language I could read but couldn't speak under pressure — and because the time I needed for practice was going into a feed I wouldn't remember an hour later. Both problems had the same fix: put the drill exactly where the scroll used to be.
Franklin Velásquez — the one person who makes VerbKey
Questions
Reasonable things to ask.
Can't I just delete VerbKey when I want to scroll?
Yes. VerbKey is a speed bump, not a prison — it makes the thoughtless reach cost you thirty seconds of thinking. That turns out to be enough most of the time, and an app that locked you out of your own phone for real would be a worse app.
Why does it need Screen Time permission?
Blocking apps on iOS is only possible through Apple's Family Controls framework, the same system behind Screen Time. That permission is what lets VerbKey put a shield on the apps you picked. It grants no ability to read your activity.
Is this for beginners?
Not really. VerbKey assumes you already know roughly what the verb means and drills you on producing the right form. If you're starting from zero, learn the basics somewhere else first and come back when the irregulars start biting.
Does it work offline?
Yes. The whole exercise engine and all the content ship inside the app. No connection is needed to earn your minutes.
What does it cost?
VerbKey is free to download and try. Gating apps requires a subscription: $39.99 a year with a 7-day free trial, or $9.99 a month. Cancel any time from your iPhone's Settings.
Android?
Not yet. The blocking depends on an iOS framework that has no direct Android equivalent, so an Android version would be a different build rather than a port.
Your verbs are the key.
VerbKey is finishing up and will be on the App Store shortly. Leave your email and I'll tell you the day it lands — no other mail, ever.