BabySparks - Development App 4+

Good app overall

Good app for providing activity suggestions. However, I would say that the number of activities suggested for each day is a bit too high especially considering that babies are very easily overstimulated and newborns need to sleep and eat quite a lot as well. Based on my experience 3-4 activities per day is more than enough for 0-3 month olds.

My other recommendation would be to make the milestones information available for each month on demand, so you can have something to look forward to, as well as see whether your baby is already doing something before the 'expected' time period (as many babies do not develop all skills equally - some may focus on physical progress, while others may focus on verbal and cognitive progress).

Developer Response ,

Hi - First of all, thank you so much for your nice review. Let me take your comments one by one:

1) Regarding the milestones, you can already do that. If you go to you baby's profile and click on "Milestones & Development Info" you should see the milestones for your baby's current month. However, if on that screen you slide your finger to the right or to the left you will be able to navigate milestones for future and past months.

2) We actually recommend doing about 5 of our activities every day, which is pretty close to your estimate (if you look our Progress Summary section you will see that all our stats are calculated using this assumption). We recognize that circumstances are different for each baby and each house. For this reason, we include a few additional activities every day, so that if for example you don't have a specific toy/material you still have other activities that you can do to complete your 5/day.

I will share your comment with our product development group so that hopefully we can find a way to communicate these 2 things better from within the app.

I hope that this helps clarify your questions. If you have any other please email us at support@babysparks.com and we will gladly assist you. Have a great day.

Good activities but slow and buggy app

The app logs me out ALL THE TIME. Also it’s frustratingly slow. Especially when you want to review all the activities for the day. After reading each one for the first time, you have to dismiss the prompt that asks you to mark it as done/too easy/too hard. It’s really slow to respond and return to the main screen. You have to do this 10 separate times when reviewing all 10 activities.

But in terms of milestone information and activities, it’s very good but there is some room for improvement in the exact set up. Some of the milestones are a bit ambiguous - like ‘has a better understanding of self as a desperate entity and acts accordingly’. How do you know when your child has that understanding? You need some concrete examples of what they would do if they had achieved this. The videos are helpful in understanding the activities. The ‘things to remember’-type section with things to consider every day hasn’t been that helpful for a while. My baby has outgrown all the suggestions or we do them anyway (like talking constantly, explaining what I’m doing). So now instead of useful new things I can weave into my daily routine, it only gives me suggestions for things suitable for a baby 6-12 months older, like potty training.

Babysparks

I have always found baby's development very interesting and was very happy when I found this app whilst on maternity leave with my first over 3 years ago. Once I went back to work I didn't really refer to the app as I knew Olivia was developing very well through her time at nursery.

Well fast forward to the last couple of weeks and I have had baby number 2 and returned to the app to add baby and look at what I should be doing and low and behold, there are ideas for my 3 year old aswell which I really hadn't appreciated. Given the lockdown situation, and the uncertainty of when she will return to nursery I will be using the app for both my girls.

Thank you