Show HN: An attempt to do a healthy screentime app for toddlers

hello, I am an indie-dev and I recently made an app for my 2y old. I am in the camp that avoids screentime as much as possible, but I also feel that she gets curious with these things that are in our hands all the time, so a complete ban is not possible. anyway we show her family photos, and grandparents do video calls.. so she's well aware that it is an interesting toy.

As she turned 2, she started demanding the phone to fiddle with it on her own. and the terrible twos are a thing, so we've never been able to just say no and expect her to move on. sometimes the tantrum she threw was such a pain to deal with that we started to think about ways. Tried parental control to lock the phone. But it was annoying when she would take a 100 useless photos. and on the gallery she can come close to deleting stuff.

It got me thinking and I ended up making an app that resembled a phone. It has a camera, dialer, gallery, and some mini-apps which are designed in a way to avoid any dopamine inducing patterns, but still get her to use her brain and hands a bit. We use app pinning (my phone is android) to lock the app to the screen so that she cannot come out of it. Same thing can be achieved with guided access on iOS. It's great for this usecase.

the tricky part was still taking the phone back. If we could successfully distract her with something else, it was easy, else we would just bear with the ensuing tantrum. That inspired me to add a "battery" to this app. Now the app dies on a pre-set timer.

So i usually hand it to her for 5-10 minutes, the battery dies, and she gives me back the phone without any protest - she wants me to charge it.

I give her the phone like this 2-4 times a day.

It worked well enough that I polished it up and decided to launch it.

Do you think this kind of screentime is ok? or NO screentime is good screentime?