I built Orbit because my daughter started asking for a phone

My daughter is eight (it's an old photo 📸). She's had an iPad for a couple of years now, mostly for schoolwork, drawing apps, and YouTube Children. I work in tech, so I've always been careful about what's on there. Screen Time limits, content filters, the family sharing dashboard. I know exactly what she's doing on that device, and for a while, that was enough.

Then the questions started. "When can I have a phone?" "Can I talk to my friends?" She's eight, so it's not urgent, but it's coming. And I started looking at what's actually out there for children her age. WhatsApp? No. Snapchat? Absolutely not. iMessage? Closer, but once she has a phone number, anyone with that number can reach her. Every option felt like handing her a door I wouldn't be able to close. I kept searching for something, anything, that let me be a parent without being a warden, and I couldn't find it.

I'm not trying to lock her out of the internet. I want her to have independence: to chat with her friends, to learn how relationships work online, to figure out the rules in a place that's actually safe to make mistakes. But I also want to know who she's talking to. And I want to know that something, or someone, is watching out for her when I'm not looking over her shoulder. No messaging app in the world gave me both. They were either wide open or completely locked down. There was no middle.

So I built Orbit 🛰️. It starts from a different place: your family is the unit, not the individual. Parents decide who's in the circle. No phone numbers, no strangers, no public profiles.

The harder part was the safety side. I started with the obvious thing: a word filter. A list of bad words; if one showed up in a message, the alert would fire. It took me about a weekend to realise how easy that is to get around. Children misspell things on purpose. They use slang. They can say something genuinely worrying using completely innocent words. A word filter catches the language, but it misses the meaning.

Introducing Mack. He's a small AI model that reads sentences for what they actually mean, not just the words they contain. I trained him on the way children really talk, and on the kinds of things children shouldn't be saying or hearing. And the other thing that mattered to me: I didn't want a server, ours or anyone else's, reading these messages, or "learning" from them. So Mack lives on the phone. He runs on the device, looks at the message, makes a call, and that's it. Nothing leaves unless something's actually wrong.

So when the time is right for her, Orbit is what she'll be using. She'll get to talk to her friends. I'll get to breathe 😮‍💨. That's the whole idea.