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

Tadidum, a screentime app built for toddlers, launched this week as a Show HN post by indie developer animeshjain. The app simulates a smartphone — with a camera, dialer, gallery, and mini-apps — and includes a fake "battery" that drains on a preset timer so children hand the device back without a fight.

The developer built the app for their own two-year-old after conventional parental controls fell short, per the Show HN post. Standard phone-locking tools still allowed the child to take "100 useless photos" and get close to deleting content in the gallery. Tadidum sidesteps those problems by replacing the full phone interface with a contained environment. On Android, app pinning locks it to the screen; on iOS, the developer recommends Guided Access for the same effect.

The mini-apps inside Tadidum are designed, according to the developer, to avoid dopamine-inducing patterns while still engaging a child's hands and mind. The fake battery mechanic is the core behavioral hook: the app shuts itself off after a parent-set interval — typically 5 to 10 minutes — and the child, believing the phone needs charging, returns it without protest. The developer says they hand the phone over two to four times a day on this basis.

The app grew directly out of a parenting problem the developer describes in detail in the Show HN post: a two-year-old who had already become familiar with smartphones through family photos and grandparent video calls, and who began demanding the device when the "terrible twos" made refusals difficult to enforce. After the battery-timer approach worked reliably at home, the developer polished the app and decided to release it publicly.

No pricing details, download numbers, or funding information are mentioned in the source. The project appears to be a solo effort with no disclosed team size, investors, or revenue model at launch.