BE THE ANIMAL

An iPhone app that maps a child's facial expressions onto a cartoon animal face in real time — and asks for nothing in return.

Smile, and the fox smiles back. Puff your cheeks, and the panda puffs. Stick out your tongue, and so does the lion. Eight animals, eight face-controlled mini-games, and four seasonal packs — free to download, with a single optional unlock that opens the rest for good — no ads, no subscription, no accounts, and no data collection of any kind.

The short version

What's in it

• Live expression mirror — smiles, winks, puffed cheeks and stuck-out tongues, mapped onto the animal as they happen. Ears perk up, hearts fly, steam puffs.
• Eight animals, all included from the start: cat, dog, rabbit, panda, fox, lion, frog, owl.
• Eight face-controlled mini-games — no buttons, only expressions. Copy the face on the card; catch falling food with a wide-open mouth; blow out birthday candles; wink to collect stars; raise your eyebrows to jump; hold a cheek puff inside a target range; roar the ghosts away; keep a perfectly still face.
• Arcade Mix — three random games back to back, with Game Center daily and weekly leaderboards.
• Four seasonal packs included — Christmas, Halloween, Harvest Moon, Lunar New Year outfits and scenes, plus the seasonal packs we make later.
• Replay videos — record a round, then replay your own expressions on any of the eight animals and save the video. Or record in Mirror mode and talk while you do it: the animal’s face, your real voice.
• 48 stickers to unlock with stars, and a sticker book to fill.
• Touch Puppet mode — decline the camera permission, or use an older device, and everything still works.

Why it's built this way

Every design decision in this app answers the same question: would I hand this to my own child and then stop watching?

• Nothing is collected. No accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no third-party SDKs. The app makes no network calls at all except Apple Game Center.
• The camera image never leaves the phone. Face tracking runs entirely on the device with no camera preview anywhere in the app — it reads expression values such as "smile 80%", and by default the camera picture is never displayed, stored, or transmitted. Photos capture only the cartoon animal; a child’s real face cannot appear in one.
• One opt-in exception, deliberately made hard to reach. Families who want their real face in a saved replay video can turn that on — behind an explicit consent dialog and a grown-up check. It is off by default, and those videos are created and kept on the device unless the user shares them.
• No engagement machinery. No feed, no algorithm, no infinite scroll, no push notifications pulling a child back, no social comparison, no strangers.
• We sell our own work once. The app is free to download and the unlock is a single lifetime purchase — the animals, games and seasonal packs we make later come with it. No subscription, no consumables, no loot boxes. (If we ever license characters from another company, that pack alone would be sold separately.)

The moment

Parents are being asked to trust less software, not more. In August 2026 Meta agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle state claims over addictive design and data collection involving minors, and the remedies — time limits, hidden like counts, banned cosmetic filters for minors — describe a category of app this one was built to be the opposite of.

Be The Animal has no feed to limit, no likes to hide, and no data to stop collecting. That isn’t a marketing position adopted after the fact; it’s why the app is paid for once by the family that uses it, rather than by advertisers, subscriptions or data.

Available assets

• App icon (PNG, 1024×1024)
• 6 screenshots × 3 device sizes (6.9", 6.5", 13" iPad) × 2 languages (36 total)
• Interviews available in English or Korean
• 30-second demo video — TBD
• Review codes on request — email cto@yeahplus.co.kr

Building a story around how the app works under the hood? We’re happy to walk you through the architecture — just ask.