BabyTime: A Video Calling App for Babies

I made an app for my 9 month old daughter

I built a video calling app for babies. Since they can’t read, the app navigation relies on photos of their grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Tapping a photo calls that family member.

I paired on the app with my friend Irena, who has a 3-year-old son. He was so pleased with himself the first time he made a call.

Then he immediately started prank calling his family by calling and hanging up on them over and over. We forgot to account for that variety of bad actor 🤔

Her son has since become a super user and uses BabyTime all the time to call his family. That surprised me. I just wanted to run a fun experiment, and I wanted an excuse to hack with my friend; I didn’t realize our kids would enjoy using the app so much.

Irena says she wishes she’d made this for her son when he was even younger.

My daughter, at 9 months old, hasn’t quite figured out how to use BabyTime. Occasionally she'll press a photo, but she gets confused by Apple’s confirm call pop-up. I wanted the whole app to be textless, since our kids can’t read, but I don’t know how to disable the pop-up. I don’t think Apple allows you to.

I'll have my daughter re-try the app every few weeks until she can use it though. Even without reading, I think she’ll understand that buttons are meant to be pressed soon.

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Postscript

This app took us one day to build, but our coding skills were rusty and it was both of our first times using Swift. I think in the future I could build an app this simple in 1-2 hours. With Cursor, we are finally reaching the age where it’s easy to home cook apps. So I recommend making software for your family and friends!