Tuta — a private baby tracker for modern families
What it is
Tuta is a baby tracker for iOS and Android. It covers ten activity types end-to-end — sleep, feeding (bottle, breast L/R, solids), diapers, growth, medicine, pumping, temperature, activity, milestones — and layers a watchOS companion on top for quick logging from the wrist. There is also a home-screen widget.
The design principle is privacy by default. The tracking data sits encrypted on the device. It does not get shipped off to a cloud you have no visibility into.
Why we built it
Existing baby trackers followed two patterns, both unsatisfying. Some synced everything to cloud infrastructure with thin accountability for how the data was used. Others had been acquired and quietly shifted from tracking babies to marketing to parents.
We wanted a third option: fast, offline-capable, no marketing surface, no data broker in the middle. Tuta started as a family tool and turned into a product because the version for our own use was already better than the alternatives.
What we shipped
- Ten activity types with both timer-based and quick-log entry
- Dual breast timers, bottle timer, solids log, pumping L/R/both
- Daily, weekly, and monthly summaries — sleep broken out into night sleep vs. naps
- watchOS companion with timer controls, quick-log actions, and a today's-summary complication
- iOS home-screen widget
- Biometric app lock (Face ID, Touch ID) and encrypted on-device database by default
- Email sign-in with no password, multi-child support, and co-parent invitations for the child's profile
- Dark mode, multiple measurement units, offline-first usage
- Live on the App Store and Google Play via tutahq.com
[SCREENSHOT: the home dashboard showing today's active timers] [SCREENSHOT: the summary view with sleep and feeding charts] [SCREENSHOT: the watchOS companion showing an active timer]
Numbers
Tuta currently supports 10+ families tracking actively. We'll share deeper usage numbers in a future post once a longer window of data is available.
What we learned
Privacy isn't a feature, it's an architecture decision. "We care about privacy" as a line in a settings screen is cheap. Encrypting the entire local database, blocking screenshots and screen recording, refusing cloud backups by default, and keeping the backend narrow enough that there is almost nothing to breach — those are decisions you make before the first line of code ships. We chose them deliberately, and the product is shaped around them.
Watch support pays off more than it looks like it will. Parents log feeds at three in the morning, one-handed, in the dark. A watch face with a two-tap timer is the difference between a tracker that gets used daily and one that gets abandoned after a month. We underestimated how central the watchOS companion would be to daily use — it is one of the first things we would recommend to anyone building a tracking product for parents or patients.
What this means for client work
Building Tuta taught us that consumer apps touching sensitive personal data — medical, family, children — have to earn trust on the surface before they get judged on features. Which is why when clients come to us with a product that handles health or family data, the first conversation is about the data model and the security posture, not the UI. Get the foundation wrong and no amount of polish will save the launch.