Baby Mode: Screen Lock

Your phone is now a toy. Only a toy.

Baby Mode fills the screen with one thing a baby can do and locks everything else. No messages. No camera roll. No calls to your boss at 11pm. The screen gets tapped for fifteen minutes. You get your inbox back, unsent.

TEN PLAYGROUNDS, DRAWN WITH A RULER

Pop — shapes drift, and a tap pops one.
Painting — colour blooms under the finger, then breathes back to paper.
Someone — a circle and two squares that watch the finger and blink.
Letters — one tap, one enormous letter.
Counting — every tap adds one. Ten and it starts again.
Rainfall — shapes fall from the finger and pile up at the bottom.
Mirror — one finger, four symmetrical trails.
Keys — five colour-coded notes and no wrong ones.
Spinner — a weighted disc. Flick it and it keeps going.
Night — taps become stars, stars join up.

Flat colour, hard edges, no characters, no story, no countdown pushing anything. A nursery drawn with a ruler.

THE WAY OUT

Hold both bottom corners for three seconds.

Two adult hands, two far-apart targets, one deliberate wait. Small hands cannot do it by accident. Two thumbs, three seconds, you're out.

For a hardware-level lock, Baby Mode walks you through switching on iOS Guided Access. Triple-click the side button and the phone physically will not leave the app until you type your passcode. Set it up once, in about forty seconds, and it stays set up.

DECIDE IT ONCE

Which toys — pick one, or pick all ten. Choose more than one and the playground changes itself every 1, 3 or 5 minutes, so a long session does not become the same screen for half an hour.
Age band — Under 1, 1 to 2, or 2 to 4. Younger means slower, larger and quieter; the oldest band hears things named out loud.
Session length — 5, 15 or 30 minutes. The screen ends it, so you don't have to.
Sound — on or off, and always underneath the phone's own mute switch.

There is a stats screen. It tells you which toy actually got reached for, across every toy a session passed through. It lives on the phone and goes nowhere.

NO NETWORK

Baby Mode makes zero network calls. No account, no sign-in, no ads, no analytics, no tracking, no third-party code. Settings and tap counts sit in the app's own storage on the device and are deleted when the app is. There is nothing to collect and nowhere to send it.

Which is also why it works on a plane, in a car park, at a wedding, and in the back of a taxi with one bar of signal.

WHAT IT COSTS

Baby Mode is free to download and opens with a 7-day free trial of everything. After the trial it needs the subscription. There is no cut-down free version — the trial is the free version, and it is the whole app.

Baby Mode Full — $4.99 per month after a 7-day free trial.

Payment is charged to your Apple Account when the trial ends. The subscription renews monthly unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel in Settings, under your name, in Subscriptions. Any unused part of the free trial is forfeited if you subscribe before it ends.

Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Privacy Policy: https://granttrudeau.github.io/babymode/privacy/

iPhone and iPad. iOS 17 or later. Works in aeroplane mode.

The only app that makes an iPhone worse on purpose.