The Shrempies app · Ages 1–5
The screen goes dark.
The music keeps going.
Most children’s apps are built to hold attention for as long as possible. This one is built to hand it back. It is a music and story product first and a screen product second — and it ends on purpose.
Early prototype · best on a phone with headphones · the iOS app comes after
The screen goes dark.
After twenty seconds without a touch, the picture fades to a near-black card with one character breathing slowly in the dark. The music does not stop. It keeps playing when the screen dims, when the device sleeps, and when it locks in a pocket. The whole screen is the way back — there is no small button a toddler has to find.
The glow is deliberately out of sync with the music. Pulsing on the beat is too stimulating at bedtime.
It ends by itself.
Every session finishes with a ritual instead of an interruption. Ninety seconds out, the scene begins dimming so gradually that a child shouldn't notice it start. Then the character waves, settles, and curls up. What's left is a still card with one thing to go and do away from the screen.
There is no continue button. No “five more minutes.” No way back into the content. The only control is Done.
A child who can't read can use it.
The home screen has no text on it at all. Three large targets, each a different colour and a different shape, each with its own sound when tapped. A two-year-old learns which one is which the same way they learn a favourite book — by shape, by colour, by the noise it makes.
Every child-facing target is at least 60×60pt. Nothing times out. There are no scores, no timers, and no fail states anywhere.
The whole home screen
Three shapes. No words.
This is the entire top level of the app. The labels below are for you — on the device there is no text at all.
Bounce
Movement. The songs a child stands up for.
Explore
Going somewhere. Curiosity, the wider world.
Rest
Steady and low. The end of the day.
What we collect
Nothing. Not a single thing.
This isn’t a policy written to be technically defensible. It is an architectural decision made before anything was built, and it is the reason several ordinary features do not exist:
- No account. No login. No sign-up. Nothing to create and nothing to forget.
- No server to sync to — everything the app remembers stays on the device.
- No analytics. Not Google's, not a “privacy-friendly” one, not our own.
- No advertising of any kind, and no third-party SDK that transmits anything.
- No push notifications to a child, ever.
- No sales message anywhere a child can see it.
When content is locked, a child sees a sleeping character— never a padlock and never a price. They read “this one is napping,” not “you can’t have this.” Anything to do with money lives behind a parental gate, in a part of the app that deliberately looks like a different product.
What’s in it
23 tracks, 11 of them free.
Six albums, sorted into the three moods. Every track is loudness-normalised to the same target (-16 LUFS), so moving from one song to the next can never startle a child who has fallen asleep to it.
Bounce
Shapes That Move
4 tracks
Wiggle & Bounce
4 tracks
Explore
Shapes Everywhere
4 tracks
Deep Down Below
4 tracks
Rest
Slow Shapes
3 tracks
Little Lights Go Dim
4 tracks
Every song ends somewhere off the screen.
Each track carries its own prompt. When the ritual finishes, that prompt is the last thing on the screen — the app’s closing move is to send a child away from it and into the room.
“Make a shape with your body. Can a grown-up guess which one?”
“Build the tallest mountain you can out of anything nearby.”
“Go and find something square. Put your hand flat on it.”
Try it before it’s an app.
There’s an early web prototype running now. It is rough in places and it is genuinely meant to be used with a real child — that is the only way to find out whether any of this works.