What "Knock" means
The brand name is the verb British children used before mobile phones existed. You knocked on your friend's front door. Their nan answered. You walked to the park. By teatime you came home. Your parents didn't know exactly where you'd been and weren't worried.
Knock isn't trying to bring all of 1995 back. Childhood wasn't pure then either. But four small things are worth restoring: Snake, knocking for a friend, being silly without it being filmed, finding yourself slowly with nobody watching. Those four are what the rest of the site is built around.
Why this exists
Three of us, in our mid-thirties, in Sheffield. No children of our own yet. The friends we grew up with started having children around 2018 and started worrying about phones around 2022. By 2023 the same kitchen-table conversation had happened forty times in our living rooms and theirs, in Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol and Stroud, with parents trying to time the switch and never quite getting around to it.
The proposition is grounded in a piece of behaviour-change theory most parents already feel in their bones. One family acting alone against the year-six WhatsApp group feels mad. Three families acting together feels reasonable. That's the trick. The kit is built so three families can switch together in the same fortnight.
Knock is not an agency. We don't have a brand book or a tagline. We are a phone, a script and a SIM, in a box, written between us in evenings, and posted from a small warehouse on the edge of Sheffield. That is the whole thing.
What Knock does
Knock recommends the right simple phone, the right SIM, and the conversation you have to have to make the switch land. We test the phones with the UK families we work with. We write the parent script and the school comms in plain English. We earn a small affiliate commission when a parent buys a phone we recommend, which is what pays for the site.
We do not stock phones. We do not run a paywall. We do not write sponsored content. We do not put affiliate links on the research, the switching kit, or this page. Those three are the trust layer. Everything else is honestly transactional and disclosed at the top of every page that carries a buy button.
Editorial standards
The standards we hold ourselves to are short enough to fit on one page. They are based on the brand guidelines we work to, and they apply to every word on the site.
- Every statistic links to its primary source. If you can't see the source, we don't print the claim.
- We never call the science settled when it is not. The mental-health evidence on smartphones is correlational. We cite Ofcom, the Department for Education, Parentkind and Ipsos by name.
- We name affiliate programmes and what they pay us, on the disclosure page. Commission rates do not change the order of the phones list.
- We re-test the top phones quarterly and update prices monthly. If a phone or programme drops out, we say so.
- We never use stock photography of children. We never call your child "kiddo", "little one" or "your tiny human".
- We describe the Ecclesfield S35 Unplugged project as a Sheffield school pilot of 75 pupils. It is not a population study and we don't pretend it is.
- If we make a mistake, we say so on the page where it landed and email anyone we emailed about it.
Who Knock would like to thank
Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough, for starting Smartphone Free Childhood. Jonathan Haidt, for writing The Anxious Generation and giving thousands of kitchen-table conversations a shared vocabulary. Liz Hunter and the team at Ecclesfield School in Sheffield, for the S35 Unplugged pilot. The 312 UK families who answered the survey Knock sent in February 2026.
How to reach Knock
Email hello@knockphone.co.uk. Replies inside one working day, Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm UK time. If you've found a citation Knock has got wrong or a phone you'd like added, please send it.
Sheffield, May 2026