A beginner’s mind is worth protecting.
初心, shoshin: the mind that meets a thing for the first time — open, unhurried, and not yet afraid of being wrong. Every child arrives with one. We make gentle, painted worlds for children aged 2 to 9 that try not to spend it.
Little Meadow, the first of them, isn’t out yet.
What we refuse
A four-year-old has no defence against a streak. We knew that when we started, so the mechanics that make children’s apps profitable never went in.
No ads. Not a banner, not a pop-up, not a “watch this to continue”.
Nothing for your child to buy. There is nothing for sale in this version at all. If that ever changes, it will live behind the grown-up gate, never in your child’s world.
No coins, gems or surprise boxes. Nothing to collect for its own sake, and nothing opened in hope.
No streaks or daily rewards. Missing a day costs nothing. The shelf is exactly where it was left.
No lives to lose, and no losing screen. A wrong try never turns anything red and never takes anything away. The guide just says, out loud, what to look for.
No leaderboards. No child is measured against another, or against themselves last week.
No one sulks when you leave. Put the tablet down mid-game and it simply pauses. Nobody is waiting for your child to come back.
About the stars
We’d rather tell you than have you find it: the games do keep a quiet count. Every finished game earns a star. The second and third come from how gently it went — how few tries it took to find the right shadow, or how rarely the comb wandered off the sheep.
Outside one music game, they never measure speed: a careful two-year-old who studies every round can earn all three. The count is kept off the screen, and a lower one is never called losing.
Stars also reset each night, on purpose, so there is no pile to protect and nothing to grind back. What stays is the shelf: a game your child has opened stays open.
Turn over every game’s star rulesWhat it costs you
Designing against the grain is a real trade, so here is the other half of it, taped down where you can see it.
It won’t bring your child back.
No streak is broken and no character is waiting. Some children need a grown-up’s invitation to return, and the app will never do that job for you.
Quiet loses the first ten seconds.
Beside an app with confetti and coins, ours can look like very little at first. We think the difference shows somewhere around the third week, not the first ten minutes.
New things arrive slowly.
Each world is made slowly and looked over carefully. There is no endless feed, and there never will be.
It isn’t perfectly pure.
Sound Garden runs on a fifteen-second song, with a bar that empties as it plays and a count of the bubbles popped. A song needs a length. It is the only clock in the app, and we’d rather point at it ourselves.
It tells Google a little.
We use Google Firebase to see which games get played and to catch crashes. It receives app events, an app identifier and device information. The app never attaches your child’s name, birth year or weekly note. Exactly what, in the privacy notice.
Nothing follows you to a new tablet.
There is no account and no cloud. Profiles and play history live on the one device, which is the point — and also means a new tablet starts fresh unless you restore a backup.
Inside Little Meadow
Play with DawnySix farm games to count, match and build.Discover with PageFive games to look, tap and explore.Built for playing beside your child, and fine for playing alone. The grown-up area gives each child a profile, lets you set a daily limit, and writes you a short note at the end of the week.
Our whole job is not to spend it.
Little Meadow is the first of these worlds. It isn’t out yet.
We don’t have a date or a price yet. When we do, we’ll say so plainly rather than hint at it.