Why I keep a list of kids apps made by parents

Finding a decent app for your kid is miserable. You search the App Store for something like puzzles, you get a wall of results with a lot of bright icons, and every one of them has five stars and a screenshot of a smiling cartoon. So you download three, hand the phone over, and find out within about ninety seconds which ones have a countdown clock in the corner and which ones play a video ad the moment your kid finishes something. You take the phone back and delete them, and you have learned nothing that transfers to the next search.

The store cannot really help with this, because the store is ranking things by how well they do the stuff I am trying to avoid. An app that keeps a kid tapping for forty minutes and shows them eleven ads looks, from a fair distance, like a very successful app.

So I made a list. It is iPhone apps for kids, built by people raising kids. Nothing on it is sponsored and no one paid to be on it, because the moment either of those is true it stops being a list and becomes advertising with a nicer layout.

It is a directory, not a store. You cannot buy anything from it, I do not take a cut of anything, and there is no ranking. It is a page with some cards on it that tells you, per app, roughly what a parent wants to know before installing: what ages it is for, whether it costs anything, whether there are ads, whether it works with the wifi off. The things you currently have to find out by installing it and watching.

Everything on it gets checked against three things.

No third-party ads. Nothing in the app is bidding on the kid holding it. This is the one I will not move on, and it rules out the “free with ads, pay to remove them” split, because that still ships the ad SDK to every kid whose parent did not pay.

Works offline. It still does its job in a car, on a plane, or with the wifi off. This one is partly practical, since the times you most want a puzzle are the times with no signal, and partly a proxy: an app that runs offline is not quietly sending anywhere a log of what a four-year-old tapped on Tuesday.

Made by a parent. I check that the person who built it is raising kids too. This sounds like the soft one of the three and I think it is actually the load-bearing one. Someone building for their own kid has already decided what the app is for, and it is not time on device. They are the person standing in the doorway watching it get used, and it shows up in what they leave out.

None of that is a certification. I am one person reading an App Store listing, a privacy label, and a note from whoever made it. It is closer to asking another parent at pickup than it is to an audit, and I would rather it stay that small and be true than get big and stop being checked.

The awkward part is that the list currently has one app on it and it is mine. Publishing a directory of one is a slightly ridiculous thing to do, and I thought about sitting on it until it looked more like a list. But a page that exists is easier to send someone than a page I am planning, so here it is, honestly short.

I know the apps are out there, because I keep running into them. A dad who built a speech app because the ones he was handed felt like worksheets. Someone who made puzzles for a kid that burned through every printable sheet on the internet. People building one careful thing for one specific child, who are not going to out-market a studio with a growth team, and who mostly have no idea anyone else is looking for what they made.

If that is you, send the App Store link and a note about why you made it to hello@spoobird.com. There is no charge to list, there is no charge for anything later either, and I am not going to ask you for a logo pack or a launch date. If it clears the three checks it goes up.

And if you are the other kind of parent here, the one just trying to find something to put on a phone before a long drive, the list is short but everything on it has been looked at by someone whose own kids use this stuff. That is not much of a promise. It is more than the search results give you.