WeWard adds app-locking mechanic to its walking-rewards platform

WeWard, the France-based step-tracking app backed by tennis star Venus Williams, has launched a feature called Walking Mode that locks selected third-party apps on a user's phone until they reach a self-set step count TechCrunch. The feature was reported by TechCrunch on July 8, 2026, and lets users choose which apps get gated — social media, games, or anything else prone to compulsive checking — and set the number of steps required to unlock them.

WeWard's core mechanic has, until now, run on a carrot rather than a stick: users log steps and earn "Wards," an in-app currency redeemable for cash, gift cards, or charitable donations TechCrunch. Walking Mode introduces friction instead of reward — restricting access rather than paying out for activity — putting it closer in spirit to screen-time and app-blocking tools like Opal or Freedom than to the fintech-adjacent step economy WeWard has built its business on.

The company says it now has 30 million users across 29 countries, including 4 million in the United States, and that its platform has been shown to increase walking time by almost 25% TechCrunch. WeWard co-founder Yves Benchimol discussed the feature with TechCrunch. To date, the company says it has paid out $20 million in cash back to users MediaPost.

On monetization, WeWard maintains it does not collect and sell user data to third parties, and instead generates revenue through in-app purchases, affiliate marketing, premium subscriptions, and advertising TechCrunch. Notably, the company frames low engagement time as a feature rather than a bug: WeWard says users spend only a few minutes per day in the app, and considers that brevity a positive metric rather than a retention problem to solve TechCrunch.

That framing is the more interesting data point in this story. Most consumer apps optimize aggressively for time-on-app because that metric feeds the advertising model directly. WeWard's stated indifference to session length — and now its willingness to build a feature that actively locks users out of other apps rather than into its own — suggests a monetization structure less dependent on daily active engagement than on the affiliate and advertising relationships layered atop a walking habit. Whether that holds up as Walking Mode scales remains an open question; app-locking features tend to generate their own retention data whether or not that was the design intent.

Williams's relationship with WeWard predates this launch by well over a year. She holds a dual role as brand ambassador and angel investor Instagram, and in early 2025 partnered with the company and the nonprofit CARE to convert walking steps into charitable support Facebook. That effort included a month-long in-app event, the "Venus Williams Championship," in which participants unlocked increasing donation amounts as they progressed WeWard blog, alongside a 50-second advertisement produced by First Frame showing Williams reaching a 10,000-step goal, which ran both in-app and on WeWard's website MediaPost.

The broader context here is a wellness-tech category that has spent a decade chasing engagement almost indistinguishable from the addictive loops it claims to counteract — step-count leaderboards, streak mechanics, badge unlocks. Walking Mode is a small pivot within that lineage: rather than compete for attention against the apps a user actually wants to open, WeWard is positioning itself as the toll booth in front of them. It is a familiar idea in a new wrapper — parents have used third-party app blockers on their kids' phones for years, often with mixed success, since determined teenagers tend to find workarounds faster than parental controls can be updated. Whether adults impose the same discipline on themselves, tied to a fitness incentive rather than a parental mandate, is the real test of this feature's staying power.

For now, WeWard's bet is that gating access to Instagram or a mobile game behind a step count converts intention into behavior more reliably than a cash reward alone. Given, the company's own data on step-time increases from its existing incentive model, that bet has at least some empirical footing to build on — though Walking Mode's actual effect on daily walking distance has not yet been independently reported.