alt Hacker NewsTell HN: 2 years building a kids audio app as a solo dev – lessons learned
Hi,
I started Muky in April 2024. Classic side project that got out of hand. We have two kids - the younger one is happy with the Toniebox, but our older one outgrew it. She started asking for specific songs, audiobooks that aren't available as figurines, and "the music from that movie."
We had an old iPad Mini lying around and already pay for Apple Music. Felt dumb to keep buying €17/$20 figurines for 30-45 minutes of content when we have 100 million songs.
Now at version 4.0 after ~20 updates. Some lessons:
On the hardware vs app tradeoff: Toniebox and Yoto are brilliant for little ones – tactile, simple, no screen needed. But they hit a wall once kids want more. And handing a 5-year-old Apple Music means infinite scrolling and "Dad, what's this song about?" Muky sits in between – full library access, but parents control what's visible.
On sharing: Remember lending CDs or cassettes to friends? Or kids swapping Tonie figurines at a playdate? I wanted that for a digital app. So I built QR code sharing. Scan, import, done. And unlike a physical thing – both keep a copy.
On onboarding: First versions: empty app, figure it out yourself. Retention was awful. Now: 4-step onboarding that actually guides you. Should've done this from the start.
On content discovery: 100 million songs sounds great until you have to find something. Parents don't want to search – they want suggestions. Spent a lot of time building a Browse tab with curated albums and audiobooks for kids. Finally feels like the app helps you instead of just waiting for input.
On going native: Went with Swift/SwiftUI instead of Flutter or React Native. No regrets - SwiftUI is a joy to work with and performance is great. Android users ask for a port regularly. No capacity for that now, but Swift for Android is progressing (https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/swift-sdk-for-a...). Maybe one day. CarPlay is another one parents keep asking for – going native should make that easier to add, if Apple grants me the entitlement.
On subscriptions vs one-time: Started with one-time purchase. Revenue spikes at launch, then nothing. Switched to subscription – existing one-time buyers kept full access. Harder to sell, but sustainable.
Ask me anything about indie iOS dev or building for kids. App is at https://muky.app if you're curious.
Comments
My kid is 9. I feel like this is a good fit with how I would like her to experience music, especially the sharing and curation part. I have a few questions...
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! :-)
This looks very nice, I love that you're making a real solution to avoid the dark patterns of companies like Spotify. I used Subsonic for a while as a simple way to curate music for kids and keep them off Spotify, but eventually my oldest got past the "listen to the same album over and over again" stage, and adding everything to Subsonic became a chore, so we succumbed to giving her an account. Yet I really don't like how Spotify has been adding direct messaging, Wrapped, Jams, discovery etc. – stuff that on the face of it looks fun (for adults), but when you see the addictive effect it has on the tweens it's just horrible. Technically I guess Spotify is now illegal for <16yo's in Australia.
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 :)
I'm currently using Flutter for a project. Considering I've been lead author or co-author on a few Android programming books, using a cross platform SDK was new for me. Dart is easy to learn, and Flutter makes attractive UI easy. I love to work on a big ambitious projects that really need platform specific implementations, but for the vast majority of cases a good cross platform SDK works well, and is a cost-efficient approach.
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.
"Finally feels like the app helps you instead of just waiting for input."
I've noticed a trend that most popular apps nowadays are the ones that serve this model.
YouTube music support? (ᵕ•_•)
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).
> SwiftUI is a joy to work with and performance is great.
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’m currently using a Yoto (3 devices) with my 1 and 4 year old and they thoroughly enjoy it. The MYO experience and loading up cards is pretty straightforward as well.
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.
Great niche!
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?
Impressive work.
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.
This is a great idea. I’ve been thinking about making something like this for a while due to all the problems you describe.
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!
This is one of my favorite tell/ show HN posts. Very interesting to see the reactions to your original "Show HN", and learn that was meaningful for your business.
Very well executed product and posts, and congratulations on your success!
Regarding the Toniebox and custom audiobooks - do you know that there’s a tool to add audio files that can be triggered by custom NFC tags?
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.
Why do you need a Spotify Developer account but not Apple Music?
You might consider the approach GoodLinks and Due take which is to sell annual upgrades on subscription so people canget off the ride at some point and still not leave enptyhanded
On the topic of Yoto I made an app[0] that helps you load audio from Youtube into playlists
How much work was it to comply with Spotify's design and branding guidelines when using their content? https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/design#introduct...
Can you explain a bit more on how this is better than just using Spotify? Is the catalogue restricted somehow?
Unsure if you're able to but can you speak to how many users you have? Have you done advertising? What rate do people sign up for it now that your on a subscription.
Great idea. The things available to give parents controlled access to music aren't great. Echo (Dot) + Kids+ seems to be the closest to meh on the speakers--the kids devices like Yoto are too limited (or require downloads) and the other voice speakers are worse than Echo/Alexa/Kids+. Which is mind-boggling because the Echo setup is wildly bad. I was thinking about how to lock an old iPad down to nothing but this app -- will need some time looking at parental controls again. Adding respect for Explicit tags might be a good feature if you don't have it. I have playlists that I'd love to share to them, but 5% of the songs need the radio edit or need to be elided.
Love the idea.
If you don't mind sharing, besides producthunt launches, how have you promoted it?
Mind sharing cashflow details? Is the business growing? Do you get a new user for every user that leaves? How do you handle converting free users into paid ones?
I like this idea, but I really don’t get it (maybe I haven’t read enough of your webpage) but how do you integrate with Spotify? Is this native or something they can block/ban. And is it possible to upload content (I have mp3s I let kids listen to on a dumb mp3 player)
Similar story here , but started mine when first Android phones were released. Had great success. And still have. Now with AI I have 2 max accounts with Claude and I don't touch any code anymore. I went full high risk cowboy style. All code. Server management, databases, security, upgrades, root access. Access to all my accounts, keys, hashes all goes into my prompts. Everything with ai. I don't even go to the Playstore site to publish. The only thing I touch is my terminal with Claude instances and opencode, Gemini or codex as backups.
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The onboarding lesson is one I had to learn the hard way too. When you build something for yourself, you forget that nobody else has the mental model you do. "Figure it out yourself" feels fine when you're the user, but it's death for retention.
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.