Everyone who loves them,
in one place
A family in BabySteps holds up to six people — your partner, the grandparents, the childminder. Named journals decide who adds to what, a one-time code decides who joins, and a quiet nudge tells everyone when there's something new to look at.
Every child has a timeline in every journal.
Everyone reads, you choose who adds
A family can keep several named journals — Parents, Grandparents, Daycare. Every child automatically has a timeline in every one of them, so nothing has to be set up twice: add a journal and each child gets a timeline in it, add a child and they appear in every journal at once.
Everyone in the family can read every journal. What you choose is who can add to each one — a simple checklist of family faces. Grandma can enjoy all of it and post to her own journal without ever landing in yours. Tap the journal name at the top of the timeline to move between them; the ones you can read but not add to carry a quiet “View only” note, so you never tap add and find out afterwards.
- Add a journal and every existing child gets a timeline in it, all at once
- A “View only” note before you tap, not an error message after
- One switch on a moment shares it with the whole family instead
- Admins can rename the family or any journal at any time, so nothing you named on day one is stuck
- Two journals can’t share a name, so you never end up with a confusing duplicate
Everyone in the family can read it either way.
A code you can read down the phone
Before you invite anyone, you decide three things: who they are to the kids — Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt, Nanny / Caregiver — which journal they land in, and whether they can simply add to it or help manage the family too. Then BabySteps mints a code: eight characters with no 0 or O, no 1, I or L, spaced out on screen so you can read it aloud without spelling anything twice.
Nothing gets emailed. You copy the code or push it through your phone's own share sheet, already written out for you. It works exactly once and expires after a week, so a code that's been sitting in a chat thread since March isn't a way into your family.
- Needs a “Daycare” journal that doesn’t exist yet? Make it inside the invite sheet
- Outstanding invites count toward the six, so nobody is turned away at the door
- Admins see every unused code, labelled with the relationship and journal, with revoke a tap away
- An expired code says so plainly instead of just failing
- The person who created the family is its owner, and can never be removed
Works once. Expires in 7 days.
Told the same evening, not next visit
When someone adds a moment, the rest of the family gets a warm, specific push — who added it, and for which child — and tapping it opens that memory. A developmental first gets its own, louder wording. Notifications only ever reach the people who could already see the moment.
They're also gentle about it. Ten photos added to one memory send one notification, not ten: anything landing within half an hour collapses together. Photos added to a moment that's already there arrive as their own quiet “new photos” nudge rather than announcing the same memory twice. And each push is written in the reader's own language, so a German-speaking grandma gets German even when the moment came from an English-speaking parent.
- A bell in the header opens a durable list of everything ever sent you
- Phones drop pushes; the inbox doesn’t — every one is still there, newest first
- Pull to refresh, older ones as you scroll, and “Just now”, “3 hours ago”, “Yesterday”
- “Mark all read” appears only when you actually have something unread
- A push and its inbox row land on exactly the same screen, even from a cold start
Switching one off quiets your phone. The inbox still keeps it.
Six people who love her. Not an audience.
There are no likes in BabySteps. No comments, no reactions, no little counters under a photo of your daughter asleep in the car. Family sharing here means shared access — everyone in the journal sees it, and the people you chose can add to it. Nobody is performing, and nobody is being scored.
The photos themselves are kept out of public reach. They go straight from your phone into private storage, they're served back through addresses that stop working within the hour, and nothing in the app is publicly linkable. A family of six, and no way in from outside it.
Made for a family, not a workspace
The details that keep six people, several journals and a couple of children from ever feeling like admin.
Two steps, or one code
Name your family, add your first child, and two little dots show you how short it is. If your partner got there first, you tap “Enter an invite code” instead and join theirs — whoever started, you both end up in the same place.
The code is handed to you
The moment your family exists you get “The Smiths is ready 🎉” with the co-parent code already on screen. Copy flips to a checkmark and “Copied!”; Share opens your phone's share sheet with the invitation written out. Skip it and it's waiting in Settings → Family.
It puts you back where you were
BabySteps remembers which child and which journal you were last looking at and opens there. Switching child keeps your journal — the two are independent — and signing in as someone else clears all of it, so nobody glimpses the previous account.
Siblings, one tap apart
Wherever a screen narrows to one child — the milestones overview, the keepsakes hub — a row of chips with each child's photo and name switches between them, oldest first, the same order everywhere in the app. With only one child the row quietly isn't there.
Mom, Grandpa, Nanny
Everyone carries a warm human label for who they are to the kids, kept separate from what they're allowed to do — so the family screen reads like your family rather than a permissions table. Anyone can set their own, and an unlabelled member gets a gentle nudge to.
Nothing irreversible is one tap away
Removing someone spells out that anything they added stays — the journal belongs to the family, not the account. Removing a child asks first and says exactly what goes. An admin can't remove themselves by accident, and the owner can't be removed at all.
Explore more of BabySteps
Their first years only
happen once
BabySteps is nearly ready. Leave your email and we'll tell you the day it lands — nothing else, ever.
Prefer to write to us yourself? hello@ourbabysteps.com