Also resonates with the "product first" approach. Starting with a real problem you actually have - and then following where the tech decisions naturally lead - seems to produce better outcomes than starting with "I want to build something in X framework."

The QR sharing feature is a nice touch. Physical sharing had something going for it that we lost when everything went digital - that friction-free "here, try this" moment. Recreating that digitally is harder than it sounds.

1. I bought her an "old school" mp3 player for Christmas, like an iPod. It's pretty good, but it's really missing the easy to use app similar to the original iTunes where she can load and manage songs by herself, without needing me to grab them from a folder, plug in the device, copy the songs across after it mounts, etc. Does Muky provide that functionaliy, like an iTunes for kids before everything went streaming and on-device?

2. She also loves audiobooks. You mention audiobooks, alongside Apple Music (I don't have Spotify). Does Apple Music support audiobooks? I would love a similar interface that promotes discover of songs, but for audiobooks.

Congrats on getting this out there. I truely believe there is a viable niche for kids music apps that sits between toddler and access to all-the-music-in-the-world-at-your-fingertips that becomes a huge time sink for kids who can't quite self regulate the shiny interface of modern streaming apps on mobile phones. I almost went down a rabbithole of building one myself, thinking, how hard can it be...thank you for saving me the 2 years to understand its hard! :-)

Well, not entirely not entirely a new experience: I had to use Xamarin on Android once because the client wanted a unified code base their existing Windows coders could maintain. It was an appropriate choice for that project, which was a piece of industrial equipment. I would not use Xamarin for mass market or even widely deployed enterprise apps.

Few questions: - Were you soloing the entire thing? What about ops/research/market analysis? What about the design?

- Did you think about it as product-first or technology-first? Other words, did you build a solution for scoped audio mgmt, or a music player for kids?

- What's your tests status? Full coverage? CI/CD?

- How did you approach the entire legal aspect? Single lawyer? Self? Not at all?

For my youngest, I installed Qobuz, which has all the music, but much fewer features. They reportedly pay artists more per stream than any of the other apps (I guess because they don't have so many expenses for social media app development). Your app UI looks much cleaner though :)

Love the concept here and I would be a customer if you were still offering lifetime, but with so many things going subscription nowadays adding another at $40/year just feels a bit on the higher side. Definitely understand how that assists with cash flow for ongoing development though.

Very well executed product and posts, and congratulations on your success!

Here’s the talk about it:

https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11993-toniebox_reverse_engineeri...

And the project website:

https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/

There’s even a custom firmware that can send activity data to Home Assistant, can pull audio from a local server, etc.

How do you manage promotion? I have a moderate amount of success with Reddit Posts, there is always a spike in downloads. But, going for a specific niche (a scrollable feed notes app) https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 means that I am never sure where I can find people who may like my app.

I like the UI of your app btw.

I've noticed a trend that most popular apps nowadays are the ones that serve this model.

It really is, unless you want to draw outside the lines. If I want to do anything that isn’t explicitly in the SwiftUI model, it becomes Kludgeopolis, very quickly. There’s some things that can only be done with UIViewRepresentable, which I consider to be a bit of a “white flag.”

Also, because of the way that the rules are written, it’s difficult for me to segregate areas of functionality into extension blocks (like I do, with UIKit). I tend to have fairly long blocks of code, which is less than optimal.

But the performance really is excellent, and I can often get a lot done, with much less code, than UIKit.

Never worked with hybrid systems, like React, so the same might be true for them.

I have a sneaking suspicion they might steal your idea and release their own version before they do that. But maybe you get lucky and they don't do that, so definitely go for it. Best of luck!

[0]https://github.com/cjlm/yoto-playlist-creator

I set a (very) old phone into child mode total lockdown with only YouTube music installed to make use of my family account and streaming playlists ... only to find it (the YTM app) wouldn't open due to the social media ban in Australia (legislation which I otherwise - controversially - completely support).

I was planning to make something that used rfid cards to play specific songs / albums so it worked more like yoto. But that would just make it even more niche!

Good luck you you!

If you don't mind sharing, besides producthunt launches, how have you promoted it?