Design and engineering decisions from inside our apps: voice cloning done safely in a kids app, sleep timers, onboarding, paywalls, AI cost control, and the small features that build trust.
Voice cloning in a kids' app is a trust problem before it is a technical one. The rules we set for Dreamify: one purpose, user-owned, deletable in one tap, and never used for anything else.
How Dreamify turns a short recording into nightly bedtime stories told in a parent's voice, how the story is personalized for the child, and what we did to keep it safe.
Most apps lose more users in the first ninety seconds than in the next ninety days. The seven onboarding mistakes we see most, and what to do instead.
Most subscription apps spend months on features and an afternoon on the paywall. What the screen should say, when it should appear, and the dark patterns that cost more than they earn.
Dreamify and Viola are built around listening, which makes them naturally useful to people who cannot see the screen well, as long as the controls work. What we learned testing with VoiceOver and Dynamic Type, and what changed.
Two of our apps are used in the dark, by tired people, right before sleep. What that does to every design decision: brightness, contrast, audio pacing, timers, and the screens that should never appear at night.
Every Dreamify story gets its own picture. Generating an illustration for a freshly written story has a consistency problem, a safety problem and a speed problem. How we handle each, and what we gave up.
A sleep timer sounds trivial: fade the audio, stop. In practice it has to survive the screen locking, background audio rules, a fade that nobody notices and a child who wakes up if it ends abruptly. How we built ours.
Parents are tired of subscriptions and generated content costs money every night. The trade-offs we weighed for Dreamify, why it ended up a subscription, and the rules we follow to make that fair.
Most parental controls are toggles nobody touches. Dreamify has one text field: things to never mention. Why it works, how the story engine treats it, and what parents put there.
Personalization for a child needs a name in the story. Privacy for a child says collect as little as possible. The nickname is where those two meet, and it shaped how we ask for everything else about the child.
The affirmation app graveyard is full of pretty sentences nobody reads twice. What we changed with Viola: scenes instead of slogans, your own details, and audio built for the last minutes before sleep.
More voices is an easy feature to add and a hard one to make good. Why Viola ships with six narrators, how we picked them, and what pacing and warmth matter more than accent.
Generic affirmations slide off. Viola writes short, specific scenes from inside the life you described, with your city, your work and your own details, and reads them to you.
Viola delivers a fresh set of affirmations every morning as cards you swipe. The format is not decoration: it forces a decision, builds a library, and keeps the morning to two minutes. The reasoning behind it.
