Listening: Music & Stories
Everyday listening: what plays, how kids choose it, and how parents load it.
What you’ll need
Section titled “What you’ll need”Design direction — not built yet.
Not much: a paired device, and the yoyopod app on a parent’s phone. Loading content is one of the app’s core jobs — a parent picks music and stories in the app and taps to send them, and the next time the device is on and connected, they arrive quietly on their own. Once a track has landed, it lives on the device as an ordinary file, and from that moment playback needs no internet at all. The app is honest about the difference between sent and arrived: it shows what is already on the device and what is still on its way, so you are never left guessing whether the bedtime story made it in time for bedtime.
From the home wheel, tap over to Listen and double-tap in. Listen is itself a small wheel with three choices today: Playlists, Recent, and Shuffle. (Browsing by artist or album is deliberately deferred until this simple version is solid.)
- Playlists are lists of tracks stored on the device itself.
- Recent is remembered by the device on its own — the last things that played, kept short, kept on the device.
- Shuffle mixes everything in the library.
Double-tap a choice and the now-playing view takes over: the artwork sits center stage with a ring around it that fills as the track plays, and one play/pause control. The full ring treatment is still rolling out — on today’s devices it may appear as a simple progress bar instead.
The most important thing about Listen: it works with no internet at all. Music and stories live on the device as ordinary files and play from there — the tunnel, the basement, and the forest all work fine. This is a deliberate product decision, not a limitation: streaming services are intentionally not part of Listen.
One honest note for now: there is no parent app yet. Today, music and playlists are loaded onto the device by the development team working directly with it. The load-from-your-phone flow this page’s outline describes is where things are headed, not where they are.
Design direction — not built yet.
Build the library together: the kid picks, the parent loads. The best libraries on these devices are small and loved, not large and ignored — and a kid who chose the songs owns the ritual that plays them.
Make playlists for moments, not just moods: stories for bedtime, the loud one for Saturday morning (Jonas has opinions), a short one for the walk to school. On a wheel with no search box, a well-named playlist is the interface.
Load before the trip, not during it. Getting new content onto the device needs the device online once; playing it never does. Ten minutes of loading the night before a holiday buys two weeks of tunnel-proof, ferry-proof, middle-of-nowhere-proof listening.
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting”Design direction — not built yet.
“Nothing to play.” The device starts empty and stays empty until a parent loads it — an empty library is a to-do in the yoyopod app, not a fault on the device.
Sent from the phone, but not on the device. New content arrives the next time the device is on and connected — check the app, which shows for each item whether it has landed or is still on its way. A device in a drawer with a flat battery receives nothing; charge it, switch it on, and the library catches up by itself.
A song stopped mid-play. It is never coverage — playback is local, so the tunnel is innocent. Check the battery first: the device warns when it is low and switches itself off safely when it is nearly empty (see Charging & Care).
Too quiet or too loud. Volume is adjusted on the device itself, not from the app — worth a minute of practice together, so the kid can fix it alone the first time it happens on a bus.
Still being decided
Section titled “Still being decided”- Adopt the yoyopod app as the only way content reaches the device, or also ship a small starter set of music and stories in the box so the first hour is never silent?
- Adopt parent-only curation — kids choose what plays, parents choose what is loaded — or give kids on-device favoriting and reordering?
- Adopt a visible storage gauge in the app that declines new loads gracefully at the limit, or handle capacity silently and hope it is never hit?
- One library or two: do music and stories share a single view on the canvas, or split into separate wheels?