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 — all in a single $2.99 purchase, with no ads, no in-app purchases, 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. Nothing sold 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. Apple’s on-device ARKit face tracking reads expression values — “smile 80%”, “jaw open 50%” — 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.
• No second sale. $2.99 buys everything, including seasonal updates.

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 a $2.99 purchase instead of a free one.

How it works (for the technically curious)

The app runs Apple’s ARFaceTrackingConfiguration headless — there is no camera preview layer anywhere in the app. Fifty-two facial blend shapes are reduced to 27 expression channels and pushed to a canvas renderer at 30 frames per second, where every animal, scene, sticker and sound effect is drawn or synthesised procedurally — there is not a single image asset in the bundle. The whole app is about 210 KB of rendering code.

Available assets

• App icon (PNG, 1024×1024)
• 6 screenshots × 2 device sizes × 2 languages (24 total)
• 30-second demo video — TBD
• Review codes on request — email cto@yeahplus.co.kr
• Interviews available in English or Korean