Locked out? You are not stranded.
Open Spark, choose Emergency unlock, and confirm. Your apps come back immediately — no key, no network, and no waiting for us to reply.
Why they are limited
An unlimited escape hatch is just an unlock button with a guilty name. Within a week it becomes the normal way you get back in, and the product is decoration — which is precisely how most blocking apps fail, one reasonable exception at a time.
A small fixed allowance behaves differently. It is unmistakably there when a real emergency arrives, and it is uncomfortable enough to spend that your tired self will usually decide the walk is easier. That discomfort is doing deliberate work. It is the same reasoning that puts the unlock behind a physical key in the first place: the cost has to be real, and it has to be payable.
The allowance is a small fixed number, not something that refills on a timer. The app shows how many you have left on the emergency unlock screen, before you spend one — check there rather than here, because that count is the live one.
When to spend one without hesitating
- The key’s battery is dead and you need a boarding pass, a ticket, or a map.
- You are away from home and the key is not.
- Someone needs to reach you through an app you have locked.
- Anything that is actually an emergency. That is the entire purpose.
When to walk instead
You are bored. You have a good reason that arrived suspiciously fast. You have already told yourself “just to check one thing”. In those cases the walk is not an obstacle to your goal — it is the goal, and spending an emergency unlock buys you a few minutes of feed at the price of the thing you bought the key for.
Nobody is going to check. The allowance is finite rather than policed, and the only person who can tell the difference between an emergency and a Tuesday is you. Deciding in advance what counts is worth more than any rule we could write here.
Running low, and losing the key
Running low
If you have used most of your allowance on genuine problems — a faulty key, a lost one, a battery that died early — get in touch. We would rather top you up than watch someone ration a safety feature they legitimately needed.
If you are running low because unlocking without the key has quietly become your routine, that is worth a different conversation, and the fix is usually not more unlocks. It is distance: the key is not far enough away. A drawer in another room works; the far side of the same desk does not.
Lost the key entirely
Use an emergency unlock, then pair a replacement — pairing a new key takes about a minute. If you have an account, unbind the lost key from it so that whoever finds it cannot use it with your phone. A found key is not a key to your phone: it stores one secret and one identifier, knows nothing about what it unlocks, and is useless without having been paired. Replacements are on the buy page, and if being locked out for a few days is not an option for you, a spare kept in a bag is the cheapest insurance against exactly this.
The four people ask
How many emergency unlocks do I get?
A small fixed allowance rather than something that refills on a timer. The app shows how many you have left on the emergency unlock screen, before you spend one — that count is the authority, not this page. It is deliberately capped so that it can rescue you without quietly becoming your normal way back in.
Do I need the key, or a network, to use one?
Neither. An emergency unlock runs entirely on your phone, so it works with the key lost, flat or three hundred kilometres away, with mobile data off, and on a day our servers are down. Needing us to approve it would make it useless in exactly the situation it exists for.
What happens when I run out?
Get in touch. If you have spent them on genuine problems — a faulty key, a lost one, a battery that died early — we would rather top you up than watch someone ration a safety feature they legitimately needed.
I have lost the key. What do I do?
Use an emergency unlock to get back in, then pair a replacement, which takes about a minute. If you have an account, unbind the lost key from it so that whoever finds it cannot use it with your phone. The key stores nothing about you, so losing one leaks nothing.