KidKat

Educational shorts for curious kids — without the doomscroll.

KidKat is a cross-platform (Android + iOS) Flutter app that gives children a safe, finite stream of short educational videos chosen by their parents. It is a curated front-end built entirely on official, permitted YouTube building blocks.

📱 Screenshots

▶️ Explore the interactive site: https://naveenneog.github.io/KidKat/

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✅ Is this within YouTube's Terms? (read this first)

The original idea — "log into a YouTube Kids account and override the YouTube algorithm" — is not possible or permitted:

Requested behaviour	Status	Why
Log into a YouTube Kids account	❌ Not possible	There is no public YouTube Kids API. Kids accounts are COPPA-restricted and cannot be accessed by third parties.
Override YouTube's recommendation algorithm	❌ Not allowed	The YouTube API Services ToS forbid interfering with recommendations or building a substitute client.
Custom video playback / stream extraction	❌ Not allowed	Apps must use the official embedded player; ripping/re-serving streams is prohibited.

KidKat takes the compliant path that achieves the same real goal:

• 🔎 Discovery via the official YouTube Data API v3 (search + metadata only).
• ▶️ Playback via the official YouTube IFrame player (youtube_player_iframe) — no stream extraction, creators keep their views/monetization.
• 🧩 Our own curation, not YouTube's — a parent allowlist plus an Education/Science category filter. We never read or alter YouTube's algorithm.
• 🚫 No Kids-account login. All profiles/controls live on-device; no child PII is collected.

🛡️ Anti-doomscroll by design

• Finite sessions — a fixed number of videos per session, then a break screen. No infinite feed.
• Daily time limit — when it's reached, the app locks until tomorrow (parent can extend).
• Swipe-friendly player — swipe up = next, down = previous (plus tap to pause and clear Back/Next buttons), all within a finite session; related-video suggestions are restricted to the same channel.
• Parent PIN gate on all settings.
• Strict Safe Search, embeddable-only, short-only (≤1 min or ≤4 min) filtering.

✨ Features

• 🐱 Friendly 3D graduate-cat branding, kid-first UI (big tiles, rounded everything).
• 📲 Swipe up/down to change videos (works over the YouTube player), tap to pause, Back/Next buttons.
• 🔖 Bookmark & Saved videos — save favorites and replay them from a Saved screen.
• 🔁 No repeats — already-watched videos are skipped in future sessions.
• 🎨 5 colorful themes (Purple Pop, Candy Bright, Ocean, Sunset, Forest).
• 🧒 Age bands (3–5 / 6–8 / 9–12) pre-load age-appropriate trusted channels and bias searches.
• 👪 Parent dashboard: API key (guided setup), interests, approved-channel allowlist, daily limit, videos-per-session, video length, Safe Search, reset today's time.
• 🎓 12 learning interests (Science, Space, Animals, Math, Reading, Nature, Art, Music, Coding, Geography, History, Human Body).
• ⏱️ Live "time left today" indicator.

🚀 Getting started

Prerequisites

• Flutter (stable). Android SDK for Android; macOS + Xcode for iOS.

Get a YouTube Data API key (free)

1. Go to https://console.cloud.google.com → create/select a project.
2. APIs & Services → Library → enable YouTube Data API v3.
3. APIs & Services → Credentials → Create credentials → API key.
4. Paste the key into KidKat's first-run setup (or Parent settings).

Run

flutter pub get
flutter run            # Android device/emulator or iOS simulator

Build

flutter build apk            # Android
flutter build appbundle      # Android (Play Store)
flutter build ios            # iOS (on macOS)

Regenerate icons / splash (after changing brand assets)

cd tool/icongen && npm install && node generate.js && cd ../..
dart run flutter_launcher_icons
dart run flutter_native_splash:create

🧪 Tests

flutter analyze
flutter test

Covers ISO-8601 duration parsing, the educational/duration/dedup curation filter, the Data API client (with a mocked HTTP client incl. quota/invalid-key handling), local persistence + daily watch-time accounting, end-to-end session building, and onboarding widget smoke tests.

🏗️ Architecture

lib/
  core/        constants, theme, router, duration utils
  data/        youtube_api · curation_service · local_store · providers (Riverpod)
    models/    topic · kid_video · allowlisted_channel · parent_config
  features/
    onboarding/  first-run parent setup
    parent/      PIN gate · dashboard
    kid/         home · session player · break · time-up
  widgets/     brand components

• State: Riverpod. Routing: go_router (onboarding redirect + parent gate).
• Discovery: YouTubeApi (search → videos hydrate, embeddable-only).
• Curation: CurationService.buildSession → finite, filtered, de-duplicated queue.

⚖️ Privacy & compliance notes

• No account login; no analytics/ads SDKs; no child PII.
• The parent's API key and PIN are stored locally on the device only.
• Intended to operate within the YouTube API Services Terms and child-privacy norms (COPPA/GDPR-K). Review platform policies before publishing to stores.

📄 License

KidKat is free for non‑commercial use under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — you may use, modify, and share it for any noncommercial purpose (personal, educational, research, non‑profit, government). Commercial use is not permitted without a separate license. See LICENSE for the full terms.

Note: this covers KidKat's own code. YouTube content played in the app remains subject to YouTube's Terms and the respective creators' rights.