For thirteen years my job has been to make things hard to put down. I'm an iOS developer, and over that time I've shipped apps at companies whose names you'd recognize, including a few of the ones people love to blame for their screen time. Somewhere along the way I fell for product management too, and I picked up all the vocabulary that comes with it: retention, time spent in app, monthly active users, session length, engagement loops. I can talk about dopamine spikes the way other people talk about the weather.
Here's the uncomfortable part of all that. A lot of the work isn't really about helping you and then letting you get on with your day. It's about keeping you. The little animation when you tap something, the satisfying sound that rewards you, the streak you don't want to break, the gentle nudge that pulls you back in once you've drifted away. None of that is there by chance. It's designed, carefully, and I know that because designing it was the job.
Then Leo came along and everything I knew started to look a little different. He's three now, and the last thing in the world I want for my son is to be hooked. I don't want him dependent on a game, and I don't want a tantrum on my hands every time the cartoons stop. I've seen how the sausage gets made, and I really did not want to feed it to my own kid.
The trouble is that I'm also a mom who travels a lot, and anyone who has flown with a toddler knows exactly how that math works out. You simply cannot carry every toy and picture book and sticker pad and box of crayons through an airport, and so at some point, on some delayed flight with a tired and bored three-year-old, the easy answer ends up sitting right there in your bag. The iPad.
That was the moment being a developer stopped being a fun fact about me and started being a genuine problem, because I knew too much. I had a very good guess about what was running under the hood of half the so-called kids' apps in the store, which was the same retention machinery I worked with every day, only painted in brighter colors. Handing Leo a tablet felt like handing him the exact thing I'd spent my whole career learning to be wary of.
So I did what I would do with any product question that worried me, which was to go and research it properly. I went looking for the calm, low-stimulation apps that everyone recommends, the ones that promise no ads and no flashing and no manipulation, and the more of them I opened the more questions I had.
Plenty of apps wear the word calm on the label, but when you actually open them up the old machinery is usually still in there, just a little quieter. There's a celebration animation every time a task gets finished, a cheerful jingle looping away in the background, a soft little "play again?" the second the child stops tapping. Some of them really are lovely and I don't want to throw them all under the bus, but somewhere along the line "low stimulation" had turned into a marketing phrase, and I couldn't always find much substance behind the claim. When you've spent years building these systems yourself, you start to notice the scaffolding even when someone has draped a nice calm-colored sheet over the top of it.
What I wanted was something I could actually trust, not a promise on a store page but a build I could look at and understand for myself, and in the end the only way to get that was to start making my own.
It began as something small and, honestly, a bit selfish, just a few apps I would genuinely feel okay about handing to Leo. No animation for the sake of animation, no noises, no rewards engineered to drag him back in, no flashing lights, just simple and quiet things that a small person can sit with for a while and then walk away from without it turning into a fight. But the further I got into it the more I started to think that I couldn't possibly be the only parent doing this math on a delayed flight somewhere, and that I couldn't be the only developer who knows the whole playbook by heart and quietly wishes someone would build the opposite of it.
The world our kids are growing up in is already loud, already over-stimulating, already tuned to hold onto their attention for as long as it possibly can. I don't think the answer is to pretend that screens don't exist, because I travel and I'm realistic and the iPad is not going back in the box. But I do believe we can carve out a calmer corner of the digital world, one that treats a child's attention as something to respect rather than something to mine, one that is actually built to be put down.
That is what this blog is for. I'm going to write here about what I'm making and why, about the design decisions behind it and the things I get wrong along the way, about what I'm slowly learning about kids and attention, and about the strange experience of taking everything I know about hooking people and using it to do the complete opposite.
I'm really glad you found your way here, and I hope you'll stick around while I figure it out.