Sleepy Time Clock

Small children cannot read a clock, and so they cannot be told to stay in bed until 7 o'clock. The standard solution is an ok-to-wake clock, which is a light that stays red while it is still night, and then turns green when getting up is allowed. It converts an abstraction that a 2-year-old cannot hold in their head into a rule that they can see with their eyes.

Sleepy Time Clock is that, and it is also the 2 other things that a toddler's room needs, running on a phone, or a tablet, that you already own.

The light is the whole product

The central component is a traffic light drawn in SVG, which is 2 circles sitting on a rounded rectangle, and its entire logic is the one boolean:

const red   = (this.props.isGreen) ? "grey" : "red"
const green = (this.props.isGreen) ? "lime" : "grey"

Whichever lamp is not lit goes grey rather than disappearing altogether, so that the light reads as a physical object with one bulb lit on it, rather than as a shape that changes. That detail is the whole difference between a child understanding it as a thing, and a child reading it as a picture.

Around it there is a clock face, and a nightlight, and white noise for sleeping through a sibling, and there are separate day schedule and night schedule screens, so that the switchover time can differ between a school night and a Saturday morning. The keep-awake package holds the screen on, because a sleep clock that goes to sleep is useless.

Built like a real app

It runs on Redux with sagas, and redux-persist, so that the settings survive a restart, and it uses react-navigation between the main screen and the settings, and react-native-sound for the noise, and react-native-svg for the light, and it has custom scaling on it, so that it works on a phone propped up on a shelf, and on a tablet across the room.

There are 20 commits between December 2018 and March 2019, and they track it from "Initial Commit with partially working app" through the fiddly part, which was the screen colors, and the background colors, and the clock face font weight, and hiding the status bar, and then they track it into the release preparation, which was the app icons, and the bundle identifier, and the provisioning profile, and then finally the missing iPad orientations.

It shipped

Sleepy Time Clock went on the App Store on 24 March 2019, which was the day after the final commit added the missing iPad orientations, and it was published by AppDog, LLC, at $0.99, for iOS 9 and later, on iPhone, and iPad, and iPod touch.

Its own listing described the thing in a single sentence, and it did so rather better than this whole page has managed to:

Sleepytime Clock is a red light green light visual clock that serves as a reminder for kids to stay in bed. It includes a white-noise generator, nightlight, and easy to use interface.

And then there is the line that I would still write the same way today:

Sleepytime Clock is completely advertisement free and collects absolutely no data.

A paid app for small children, with no ads on it and no telemetry in it, was a position rather than an oversight. I took the same position 7 years later with Memorize The Bible, which has no account, and no analytics, and nothing at all sent anywhere. Apparently I have only ever had the one opinion about this.

Where it went

I took it off the store when I wound down AppDog, LLC, which was the company that it had been published under. The listing is gone now, and the app is not on sale anywhere at all.

It was built, and it was released, and people paid a dollar for it, and then the company that had sold it stopped existing.