Larova

Nico Wiedemann

In-app purchases

About this app

Larova is an app you set up on your child's phone. You fill it with the things you would otherwise have to explain — how bedtime works, what your child eats, who to call, what helps when they are upset.

Grandparents, a babysitter, a daycare teacher or a coach open the app, find what they need in two taps, and can reach you immediately if something comes up.

WHAT YOU CAN PUT IN IT

The start screen is a grid of tiles you arrange yourself. Each tile holds one kind of thing:

• Guide — numbered steps, one per screen, with text and optionally a picture or a recording
• Video and audio — from your gallery, or recorded on the spot in your own voice
• Note — free text with headings and bullet points
• Checklist — items to tick off, optionally resetting each morning
• Table — columns and rows you define yourself
• Call — a name, a number and a photo, one tap to dial
• Website, app shortcut, folder

Everything inside a tile is written by you. Larova provides the shape; you provide the content.

TWO VIEWS

Caregiver view is what the app normally shows: read, tick things off, make a call, open a link. Nothing can be changed, moved or deleted by accident.

Parent view unlocks with a PIN or your fingerprint. Only there do the edit handles, the plus button and the backup options appear. After five minutes without input, the app returns to caregiver view by itself.

That is why you can hand the phone to anyone without a word of explanation.

GET HELP

A bar sits at the bottom of every screen. Behind it are the numbers you chose, shown large, with a photo and a relation — "Mum", "Dad", "Dr Keller", "112".

Tapping one opens the phone app with the number ready. It never dials on its own and never sends your location anywhere. The person holding the phone decides.

YOUR DATA STAYS YOURS

Larova stores everything on the device and nowhere else. No account, no analytics, no internet permission at all. Nothing you write is sent to us, because there is no "us" to send it to.

One menu item packs all your tiles, pictures and recordings into a single file. You choose where it goes — the phone itself, a cloud drive, a USB stick. That same file is the handover package: send it to your partner or the other grandparents, they open it in their own copy of Larova, and everything is there. You can protect it with a password.

LIGHT, DARK AND NIGHT

Three appearance settings. The third exists for one reason: reading a bedtime guide aloud in a darkened room from a white screen does not work. Night uses warm amber on near-black and avoids bright surfaces entirely, so nobody wakes up.

FOURTEEN LANGUAGES

You can set Larova's language independently of the phone's. A grandmother who does not read German can put the app into Turkish while her grandchild's phone stays in German.

The app is translated. What you write is not — your words stay exactly as you wrote them, and are never sent anywhere to be translated.

WHO MAKES IT

Larova is written by one person: a parent of three, one of whom needs more help than the others. No company, no investor, no advertising — the full version pays for the time.

WHAT LAROVA IS NOT

Larova is a notebook. It does not diagnose, does not calculate, does not interpret what you write, and does not give advice. It is not a medical device and not an emergency service. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.

Free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.

What’s new

Fixes a problem that could lose your translations: adding, removing or reordering part of an already-translated tile left its other languages out of step, and one could end up showing the original's words. Every language now keeps the same shape, and you can make those changes from any of them.