Plain and Simple Toddler

Five quiet activities for a small child. No adverts, no purchases, no accounts, and nothing at all collected — not even which pictures they finished.

Plain and Simple Toddler is five calm activities for a young child, and a lock so they stay in them.

FLIP BOOK Pick a category and hand the device over. Your child swipes or taps through simple pictures, one at a time, filling the screen. Tapping is easier than swiping for small hands, so the whole page is the target.

STICKER SCENE A tray of pictures and an empty page. Tap a picture and it lands on the page; drag it about, or drag it back to the tray to take it off. There is nothing to finish and nothing to get right — it is the one to hand over when there is time to fill.

COLOUR IN The picture starts as an outline. Your child taps a part of it and that part's colour appears, until the whole drawing is done. There is no palette to choose from — every part already knows its own colour, so there is nothing to get wrong and no wrong answer to give. A tap that misses slightly still colours the nearest part.

WHICH ONE? One picture at the top, a few underneath, and your child taps the one that matches. Getting it right makes that picture's colour appear. Getting it wrong makes the choice fade and settle back, and the round carries on with everything still on screen — no red mark, no cross, and the one they got wrong is never taken away. How many they choose between is your setting, and it never changes on its own.

TRACING Your child follows a light grey line with a finger, and the picture fills in as they go. Stray outside and the mark quietly fades rather than turning red — this app never tells a two-year-old they got it wrong. Finish, and the drawing they were following becomes the finished picture, part by part, and the app says what they made. That is the whole reward: there is no score and never a mark out of ten.

COLOUR, OR NOT Every picture can be shown in colour or as plain black-and-white line art. The outline mode is the reason this app exists: for a child who finds a page of colour too much. You can switch between them mid-session, without leaving the activity.

NINETY-ONE DRAWINGS Shapes, flowers, vehicles, diggers, animals, toys, the alphabet and the numbers. The letters are drawn the way a child is taught to write them — the right strokes, in the right order, in the right direction — rather than traced around the outside of a printed letter.

A LOCK, AND AN HONEST WORD ABOUT IT One tap hides every button, and a two-second hold brings them back. It stops a child tapping their way out of the activity. It does not stop them swiping home, because no app can — so the app shows you how to switch on Guided Access, which does, and then stops mentioning it.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No adverts. No purchases, no subscription, nothing to unlock. No accounts and no sign-in. No analytics of any kind. No sound at all. No scores, no stars, no streaks, and no record of which pictures your child has finished — that last one is a decision, not an oversight.

Nothing is downloaded after you install it, and the app makes no network requests of its own. Your settings are kept on your device and copied to your own iCloud so your other devices match. We never see them. There is no server to see them with.

Made by one person, who uses it.