Four parts in, the pictures existed, the tool worked, and the questions I’d been carrying about copyright were settled. This last part is about what actually happened once my daughter got her hands on it.
Once the song tab had pictures, did she actually use it the way you hoped?
More than I hoped, honestly. Tapping through pictures to find “her” song became a favorite activity on its own — separate from actually listening to anything. She’d flip through several before settling on one, the same way she flips through book covers on the other tabs.
Is there a specific moment that stuck with you?
About a week in. After daycare, she usually asks to go for a walk before dinner. That week, more than once, she asked to skip the walk and go straight home instead — so she could listen to the new songs.
That’s a strange thing to feel proud and slightly worried about at the same time. The feature worked exactly as designed. It also worked a little too well.
That sounds like a clean win. Was there actually a downside?
There was, and it wasn’t about the app itself. With this much of her attention going through a phone screen, my wife and I got more worried about her simply having a phone in her hand so often. Not because Kids Player does anything wrong — it doesn’t reach outside itself — but because a phone that can run one safe app can also, one wrong tap away, open a text message or a link it shouldn’t.
So what did you actually do about that?
We bought a Samsung Galaxy A17, about 290,000 won. I stripped it down to only the apps that can’t be removed, hid everything else off the home screen — including Google News and anything else that opens on its own — and left Wi-Fi as the only way it connects to anything. The only thing she can actually launch on it is the Kids Player.
It’s her phone now, in the sense that matters: it does the one thing she wants and nothing else. Right now, that one thing is mostly the new song tab.
Looking back across all five parts — was the picture-first idea the actual hard part, or was it everything around it?
The idea was simple from the start: give the song tab the same picture-based front door the other tabs already had. Almost everything hard came after that — describing it clearly enough for Claude to build the right shape, finding an image tool that actually followed instructions, deciding to make everything original instead of taking a shortcut, and then watching what a three-year-old actually does once you hand her the result.
What’s next for the tab?
This isn’t the last library that will ever need this treatment. The pattern is set now — pick a source of audio, give every item a real picture, let a three-year-old drive it by sight — and whatever comes into the player next will use it without having to relearn any of this.