Baily is an application focused on family unity, developed in partnership with a psycho-pedagogue. In it, parents can create and manage their children’s routines to unify responsibility. The family section is an abandoned segment in the App Store. During the development, six apps were available, and most didn’t receive an update in a long time or had severe UI and feature bugs.

We developed Baily because, in Brazil, the responsibility for raising children falls more heavily on mothers, as fathers are usually the breadwinners or single mothers who have to look after their children alone. In this way, we want to help create more engaged families. Where all members not only know the routines but also actively engage with them.

iCloud

The application uses a QRCode system where you first add the person’s email address to the primary guardian’s cell phone. Then, the secondary guardian must read the QRCode. We implemented this way to increase the security of our users as much as possible since this is data relating to children. In addition, a guardian can lose access to the primary parent at any time.

Once connected, the secondary parent’s cell phone will synchronize with the shared iCloud, downloading photos, routines, and the list of children.

Photos

The guardians can also take photos in the moments, and they sync between everyone connected. This feature was a special request by the psycho-pedagogue, who said that this could be the big difference between us and the other apps on the App Store. Crudely speaking, guardians and elderly individuals take a lot of joy in taking pictures of their children, and while you have the Apple iCloud family sync, the app provides a hub for only these kinds of photos.

To optimize the data usage, photos sent by the app are available for download for up to three days, after which they disappear from the shared iCloud but stay in the local gallery of everyone who downloaded them, and iOS itself makes the iCloud backup.

As some guardians have several children, it’s possible to unify certain activities so you can see everyone taking part in them.

Children

You click on add child, enter a name and image, and after this, the child becomes available in the quick view and can receive new activities.

In addition, the app will send the new child to all guardians. If you later wish to remove it, the activities she participates in will remove her relationship and be deleted, in case she was the only child assigned.

Once you have at least one child registered, you can add activities. To add an activity, you need the following information:

• Title
• Hour
• The children taking part
• Days repeated or chosen
• Category
• A note that other people can read. (optional)

Once created, the app sends it to everyone and monitors to see if it’s close to the time or completed on another device. If it’s a repeating activity, it’s updated daily at midnight. Weekly activities reset those that belong to a single day last week and don’t repeat are deleted to save space in the user’s iCloud and cell phone.