Kiddopia review: Ruined by vulture capital in 2025

This used to be the industry best. When it sold 100% to Nazara, it has gradually become worse and worse. While it still has the old content and the holiday events, they have buried the educational material while trying to capture audience with flashy, non-educational content. This primarily does not engage the child, but seeks to inure them and keep them quiet but that is it. It used to thoroughly balance play with practice, quite frankly it was impressive and you could tell it was designed by good parents. Now, Pocoyo (a laughably awkward aping of Cocomelon) and licensed materials, like the PJ Masks, are especially bad and have featured as the main content that a child will see first when opening the app. These are not incidental placement choices, but specific monetizing efforts to claw more from the user. New content did not used to be the first visible item. There is no way to customize this and limit time on certain places in the app. They are clearly only interested in the portions of the app that generate maximal use, like any other addictive phone game. I expect that from a company like this, but to turn a solidly curriculum backed education/edutainment toddler app into nothing more than a pre-consumer prep platform is frankly disheartening. I hope the original creators are happy selling out, because their work is being used to slop out more of the same thing they were originally claiming they wanted to fight: Borderline abusive kid apps that throw out education as bait, only to hook the child the moment it becomes a babysitter for a tired (paying) parent.

I paid this subscription almost the entirety of its lifespan; before it even had a sub I paid for the lifetime access (which they revoked, with dubious legality). A teacher recommended it to me back then. I have 4 children and they all loved it; even the older kids look at it now, and are disgusted by what has become of it. Over the years, hundreds of dollars. I don't pay for many such things. I showed the changes to my youngest child's teacher now, and they said they do not recommend it. Neither do I.