Educational Startup KinderTown Launches KinderSights, Tells App Developers What Parents Want

KinderTown, the company that makes the ever-useful educational app store for parents, is rolling out a new service targeted towards app developers. KinderSights, as it’s called, will offer up a series of monthly reports based on KinderTown’s internal data. The reports aim to answer the question: what apps are parents looking for right now?

Since April, the startup says parents have performed over half a million searches for kids apps using KinderTown, and currently, most are in search of apps for language (34.9%) and math (33.8%).

Other subjects saw less interest including art (14.6%. Really, people, we’re all set on the “use your iPad as a drawing canvas” thing now!), social studies (8.9%) and science (7.9%). KinderSights will also drill down more into this data, to reveal the sub-categories of interest, too. For example, “Letters & Sound Recognition” was the most searched concept under language, followed by “Listening” and “Phonics.” KinderTown’s Director of Education Carolina Nugent said that it makes sense these are the subjects parents are searching for, given the age range currently targeted by the app. (KinderTown only recently expanded to include ages 7 and 8).

The new KinderInsights reports will offer other advice too, on things like what’s the best way to monetize apps, how do parents like to pay, what important gaps are there in kids’ offerings, and more. It would be nice if the sample size was even larger, but this should still be good data – after all, the only people who are currently using KinderTown are tech-savvy parents who are interested in finding quality, pre-vetted apps for kids.

I’ve become a KinderTown user myself, after finding the official App Store experience a bit overwhelming. (I mean, c’mon, it’s not like you pop out kids and instantly become a parenting expert, you know). I had no idea which apps were any good, which is how I ended up with junk like Talking Tom on my kid’s iPad. Don’t get me wrong, she loves it, but it’s brain-rotting crap overrun with ads. KinderTown has since saved me from making that same mistake again.