One finger in the bottom-left corner, one in the bottom-right, at the same time, and do not lift either. Each corner fills in as you hold it, and a bar across the bottom of the screen shows the three seconds counting. At three seconds the playground closes.
If that is not working: both fingers must be inside the corners, and both must stay down for the whole three seconds. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen to go Home also works — Baby Mode cannot block that, and does not try.
Inside a playground there is no back button and no menu. The only control is the pair of corners, labelled along the bottom edge. That is the entire point of the app. There is exactly one way out, and it is designed so that an adult can do it in the dark and a one-year-old cannot do it at all.
Two adult hands, two far-apart targets, one deliberate wait. Two thumbs, three seconds, you’re out.
Why not a passcode? Because you would be typing it forty times a day with one hand while holding a baby with the other. The gesture is faster than a passcode and just as impossible for a toddler. If you want something a determined four-year-old genuinely cannot beat, use Guided Access — next section.
Baby Mode locks its own screen. Guided Access locks the phone. It is built into iOS, it is free, and while it is on, the phone physically cannot leave the app — no Home swipe, no app switcher, no Control Centre, no notifications pulled down, no accidental calls. It takes about forty seconds to set up and you only do it once.
Worth knowing: on the Guided Access start screen you can circle areas of the screen with your finger to disable them, and tap Options to switch off the volume buttons, the sleep/wake button, keyboards, and motion. Turning off the volume buttons is the difference between a calm car journey and a very loud one.
Baby Mode cannot turn Guided Access on for you. No app can — iOS reserves it for you and your passcode. We show you where the switch is. You flick it. If you forget the Guided Access passcode, Apple’s only remedy is erasing and restoring the phone, so write it down somewhere that is not the phone.
Almost always, this is the phone doing exactly what you told it to.
Baby Mode follows the phone’s mute switch. This is deliberate. An app that overrides silent mode is an app that shouts a letter of the alphabet across a quiet restaurant, a waiting room, or a sleeping second child. We decided we would rather you had to flick a switch than have that happen once.
Three bands. They change how fast things move, how big the shapes are, how loud it is, and whether anything is spoken aloud. Every playground is available in every band — the band is a pace, not a gate. They are a difficulty setting, chosen by you. Baby Mode does not verify anybody’s age, does not ask for a birthday, and does not care whether you tell it the truth.
| Band | What changes |
|---|---|
| Under 1 | Slowest movement, largest shapes, quietest sounds. Nothing is spoken aloud. |
| 1 to 2 | Middle speed and size, sounds a little louder. Nothing is spoken aloud. |
| 2 to 4 | Faster, smaller shapes, full volume — and the only band that says letters, numbers and shape names out loud. |
Change it any time in the parent settings. Nothing is lost, and the stats keep counting across bands. If the youngest band still feels busy, turn Sound off — it changes the room more than any other setting.
Five, fifteen or thirty minutes. When the time is up, the playground closes on its own and the phone returns to the picker. The screen ends it, so you do not have to be the one who ends it.
The time remaining is shown small along the top edge, for you rather than for them. There is no alert and no countdown noise; over the last ten seconds the screen simply fades to paper, so handing it back is their idea too.
Set it in the parent settings. There is no unlimited option, and there will not be one.
Baby Mode is free to download and opens with a 7-day free trial of the whole app. After that it is $4.99 per month, renewing automatically until you cancel. There is no cut-down free version — the trial is the free version, and nothing is held back during it.
Family Sharing is on. One subscription covers you and up to five other people in your Apple Family group — six phones and iPads in total, one payment. This is the normal case for us: the phone that gets handed over is whichever one is nearest.
Only the person who pays sees the subscription in their Settings, and only they can cancel it. If you would rather not share this particular subscription, you can switch it off for Baby Mode alone in Settings › [your name] › Subscriptions without leaving the family group.
Cancelling is done in iOS, not in our app. Apple does not let developers cancel subscriptions on a customer’s behalf, which is annoying for exactly two minutes and reassuring forever.
The full path: Settings › [your name] › Subscriptions › Baby Mode › Cancel Subscription
You can also get there from the App Store: open the App Store, tap your profile picture top right, tap Subscriptions.
Cancel at least 24 hours before the trial ends or the first charge goes through. Apple bills a day early on some accounts. If you are trying it out and are not sure, cancel on day five — you keep full access until day seven either way. Cancelling never cuts you off immediately; it stops the next charge and leaves you access to the end of the period you have paid for.
Apple is the merchant. Every payment, receipt and refund goes through them, and they are quick about it. Go to reportaproblem.apple.com, sign in with your Apple Account, find Baby Mode and request a refund. Say plainly that you did not intend to subscribe. Most of these are granted.
We cannot issue refunds ourselves — we never see your payment details and cannot touch the transaction. If Apple declines and you think that is wrong, email us and we will tell you honestly whether we think you have a case.
New phone, restored backup, deleted and reinstalled the app, or a second phone in the house — the subscription follows the Apple Account, not the device.
Nothing is charged. Nothing can be charged twice — iOS will not let it happen.
If Restore does nothing, check three things, in this order:
The subscription belongs to the Apple Account that bought it, and works on any iPhone or iPad signed into that account.
Almost certainly by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to go Home — babies press their whole palm on the glass and produce gestures no adult would think of. Baby Mode cannot block the system Home gesture. Nothing on the App Store can. That is what Guided Access is for; see section 02.
Not from inside Baby Mode — there is no dialer, no contacts access and no way to reach another app from within a playground. But if they swipe out to the Home Screen, they are back in a normal iPhone with normal apps. Guided Access is the only thing that makes that impossible. Set it up once.
Yes. Baby Mode cannot suppress notifications; that is a system setting. Turn on a Focus, or switch on Guided Access, which prevents the notification centre being pulled down even when banners arrive.
No. Every playground, every setting and the stats screen work in Aeroplane Mode, in a tunnel, on a plane, in a car park, at a wedding. The only thing that needs a network is the initial purchase and the Restore Purchases button. There is no download, no streaming and no sync.
No. Baby Mode makes no network calls at all. No account, no ads, no analytics, no tracking, no third-party code. Settings and play counts live on the phone and are deleted with the app. Our App Store privacy label says “Data Not Collected”. The full privacy policy spells out COPPA, CCPA and GDPR in detail. There is nothing to collect and nowhere to send it.
It counts how long each playground was open and how many taps it got, so you can see which toy actually gets reached for. It is for you, it is stored on your phone, and it goes nowhere. It is not a developmental assessment and should not be read as one.
Yes. Baby Mode is one app that runs on both. On iPad the playgrounds fill the larger screen with more to touch rather than the same thing scaled up, the corner targets grow and sit further apart, and the screen rotates. Your subscription covers both.
Yes, in two ways. On any iPhone or iPad you sign into with your own Apple Account, the subscription follows you — see section 07. And because Family Sharing is on, up to five other people in your Apple Family group can use it on their own accounts, off the one payment — see section 06.
Baby Mode keeps the screen awake while a playground is open. If it still dims, check Settings › Display & Brightness › Auto-Lock and try switching Low Power Mode off.
On iPhone, correct — it is portrait only, because a screen that rotates in a small pair of hands is one more thing to go wrong. iPad rotates freely, and a drawing survives the rotation rather than being wiped.
Expected. Settings live on the device and only on the device, so deleting the app removes them. That is the same decision as collecting nothing — there is no cloud copy because there is no cloud. Setting it up again takes about fifteen seconds. Your subscription is unaffected; tap Restore Purchases.
We are not going to pretend an app is a health intervention. What we will say is what the app does: it does not autoplay video, it has no infinite feed, no rewards, no streaks, no notifications and no way to get to anything else. It stops on its own after five, fifteen or thirty minutes. If you want zero screen time, that is a completely reasonable position and you do not need this app.
Possibly. Tell us what your child actually does with the phone when they get hold of it — that is more useful to us than a feature request.
Baby Mode respects Reduce Motion, the system volume and the mute switch, and it scales the text on every parent-facing screen with your text size setting. It does not scale type inside the playgrounds, because there the letters and numerals are the artwork rather than reading matter. The exit gesture is labelled for VoiceOver. If a specific setting makes it unusable for you, email us — we read every one of these.
Include your iPhone model and iOS version if something is broken. Screenshots help. If we cannot fix something we will say so rather than sending you a form.
Billing and refunds go to Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com — we have no access to payments.