Frequently Asked Questions

Fair question! First of all, Cocopine is so much more than YouTube Kids or anything else out there: pre-screened educational content, courses, weekly summaries, and other unique features cannot be found elsewhere!

As far as YouTube Kids goes, there are multiple issues we found with YouTube Kids that Cocopine addresses:

1. Many channels and videos are not available on YouTube Kids, even though parents might consider them to be totally safe for their kids to watch.

2. Some channels or videos that are available on YouTube Kids may not be considered safe by parents. For example, a Lego video depicting a plane crash with characters in panic and saying all kinds of strange things. Videos like this may seem harmless at first glance, but they can be traumatizing to a child.

3. As children grow older, they don’t want to use YouTube Kids because it’s meant for smaller kids.

4. YouTube / YouTube Kids doesn’t guarantee that a child safe video doesn’t show inappropriate ads.

5. User experience of figuring out how to configure YouTube Kids to minimize harm to children is non-trivial. You can access more sophisticated controls in YouTube Kids, but you’ll need to spend a lot of time researching that.

YouTube does have something called “supervised experience”, but it does not guarantee absence of unwanted content, e.g. YouTube itself says, “our systems are not perfect and will make mistakes” about it. This makes YouTube’s parental controls unsuitable for families.

Cocopine’s set of features is unique and we are constantly improving the app. There’s nothing else like Cocopine out there! In addition, Cocopine’s look-and-feel is superior because we built Cocopine with mobile-first technologies. We don’t show ads, and are not incentivized by metrics like video views, or engagement, like YouTube or other apps. We will be happy if your child uses Cocopine minimally!

1. Ask your child about which channels they want to watch.
2. In addition to the channels above, add educational channels or our prescreened collections based on what you think your child might be interested in.

This way, you can at least ensure your child doesn’t get addicted to more questionable content and contain the problem.

YouTube is a double-edged sword: on the one hand there are a lot of addictive and mindless videos, but on the other there’s a lot of great educational stuff as well. This is why we have educational channel recommendations, prescreened collections of intellectually stimulating videos and Courses!

No, you don’t need a Google account to use Cocopine. You sign up with Cocopine as a parent and create a separate profile for each child. The app works in two modes - parent and child - and we recommend installing Cocopine on both the parent’s and child’s devices.

While Cocopine doesn’t have a concept of a playlist (at least for now), you can effectively create one by picking any individual videos for your child to watch. These videos will be available on the child’s home tab. In addition, you can turn any YouTube playlist into a Course!