Cradlebird

About

A purpose-built mobile app that turns a certified off-the-shelf Wi-Fi camera into a full-featured baby monitor: cry detection, two-way audio, night vision, multi-caregiver pairing, a sleep timeline, and temperature and humidity, with video that stays in the home and no account required. The pitch is a single line: your baby, your data, your home.

Cradlebird is in planning. The name and domain are secured, and the app builds on the same React Native foundation as ViewPane.

Why This Exists

The Wi-Fi baby monitor category has drifted into a pattern parents dislike: premium hardware gated behind recurring subscriptions for features they thought they were buying once, with all footage living on the vendor’s servers. The alternative, a radio monitor, avoids the subscription but ships without an app, remote view, or event history.

There’s a gap in the middle: a Wi-Fi-connected, app-driven, local-first nursery monitor. That’s the product.

Planned Approach

• React Native + Expo with TypeScript end-to-end, sharing libraries with ViewPane
• RTSP and ONVIF camera integration with per-vendor support for popular consumer cameras
• On-device cry detection so no audio ever leaves the phone
• Two-way audio, push-to-talk and hands-free, over the camera’s native audio session
• Bluetooth pairing for common temperature and humidity sensors
• Optional encrypted remote access that the parent installs and controls
• Native keychain storage for camera credentials and pairing keys

Hardware Strategy

A certified-camera list rather than our own hardware. Parents buy a camera they like from a short list of tested models, and the app makes it work as a nursery monitor. No inventory, no proprietary device, and the camera keeps working as a camera if they ever stop using the app.

Privacy Architecture

• Video stays on the customer’s local network by default; any cloud backup is opt-in and encrypted on the phone before it leaves
• All inference runs on the phone or inside the camera, never in a cloud
• No ad-tech SDKs
• Camera credentials and pairing keys stored in native Keychain / Keystore
• Remote access is optional, user-installed, and end-to-end encrypted

What Makes It Different

Most baby monitor apps are either a subscription-first cloud product with a pretty UI or a radio monitor with no app at all. Cradlebird works with cameras the customer already owns or can buy inexpensively, keeps video at home by default, and is built so that promise is enforced by the architecture rather than by policy.