Numbers 4
Toddlers
Built in 2012 for one very specific user.
Before the portfolio, there was a toddler with a phone.
Numbers 4 Toddlers was created for the founder’s infant daughter as a simple educational Android app. It offered a direct, playful way to explore ABCs, numbers, shapes, colors, animals, and everyday objects.
The app included a custom child lock, designed to keep a toddler inside the experience. When active, it intercepted Menu, Search, and Back. To unlock it, an adult had to touch the screen’s upper left, upper right, lower right, then lower left corners in order. A wrong touch reset the sequence.
It was not a market opportunity or a large-scale release. It was a small, specific thing that needed to exist.
Recovered interface artwork.
This is the original chalkboard menu as it appeared in the app, preserved from the recovered 2012 material.
A small world of things to explore.
The app used distinct sets of artwork to introduce letters, numbers, colors, shapes, animals, and everyday objects. A selection from those original asset groups is preserved below.
In ABC mode, children could move forward and backward through all 26 letters. Each letter paired its character with an object or animal, often selected from two possible images, such as Apple or Ant for A, Ball or Bell for B, and Giraffe or Goat for G. The background also varied as a child moved through the alphabet, chosen from a palette of 18 colors.
Preserved from the original build.
This archive was assembled from assets recovered directly from the original Android APK, created in July 2012. The recovered material includes original artwork, interface resources, Android layout files, and additional original Java source.
The source is preserved as archive material and informs the historical notes on this page. It is not reproduced here. What remains is enough to show the care and specificity of the app that was built.
Useful first.
Everything else after.
Numbers 4 Toddlers was not built after identifying a market opportunity. It was built because something useful should exist. That pattern still drives Livable Studios today.
More than a decade later, the projects are different. The instinct is the same: make the thing that feels worth making, then make it as clear and useful as possible.
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