It started with
a piano.

The kid wanted to find a song by ear. Tap a key, hear a note, find the next one. That’s the whole job.

The apps we tried had other plans. The music kept stopping for ads. We weren’t the only ones who noticed. One review of a piano app says, “literally every single time I go to hit a key an ad pops up.” Another says, “Now you can’t close the ad to get back to the keyboard.”

So we built Open Piano: labeled keys, a trail of the notes you played, and record and play back. It has no ads, no account, and no tracking. It’s free, and nothing in it is waiting to be unlocked.

Then we looked around. We collected 121,602 App Store reviews and went through the 46,070 one- and two-star ones, across 2,540 apps. We found the same thing everywhere. The tuner wants your personal data. The tally counter “demands $13 every time I open the app.” The white-noise machine stops after five minutes unless you pay. These are tiny tools that each do one job, and they’re buried under ads, paywalls, and fake limits.

Each one is small enough to build right, so we’re building them, one at a time, in public.