Sometimes, children have a way of conveniently forgetting to reply to texts from their parents. One father has taken the initiative to create a mobile app that freezes his son’s phone until he responds to his father’s message.
The father, Nick Herbert, created the app ReplyASAP, after getting annoyed with his son ignoring him.The app seizes the phone’s screen and sounds an alarm, forcing the child to respond to his/her parent if they want to have access to their phone again.
Herbert said that it had previously been hard to get in consistent contact with his son and he didn’t have an answer to the problem. “There didn’t seem to be a solution out there that allowed me to send a message to him, that would override the silent function, appear over whatever he was doing and tell me when he had seen it,” Herbert said.
The app also notifies parents when their child has seen their message. Herbert said that his son was accepting to the app. “He knows when to use it and when I send him a message on it, it will be important,” he said.
ReplyASAP is currently only available for Android, but an iPhone app is in the works. There are other apps that allow parents to remotely lock a phone such as Ignore No More.