The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2023
Aviator turns an iPhone into a toddler-friendly radar for spotting planes in the sky
A dad rebuilds flight tracking for his plane-obsessed toddler: no map, planes scaled by real visibility, and a compass that points to the sky.
Jacob Bartlett
What it had to solve
Jacob Bartlett's two-year-old became obsessed with aeroplanes after a cockpit visit on holiday, and the family spent evenings plane-spotting from the garden. FlightRadar24 existed but demanded skills a toddler does not have: reading a map, orienting yourself, and judging which blip at which altitude would actually be visible in the sky.
How it works
After a cockpit visit on holiday, Jacob Bartlett's two-year-old became obsessed with aeroplanes, and father and daughter spent evenings in the garden spotting them. FlightRadar24 showed the same data, but it was built for adults: you had to orient yourself on a map to know where to look, a Learjet at 40,000 feet looked identical to an Airbus just taking off, and a toddler neither understands nor cares what a map is.
So the product requirements came from the actual user: the screen must rotate with the device so planes stay in the right direction, aircraft must be bigger or smaller according to how easy they are to see from the ground, and the whole thing must feel like a retro kid's toy, not a business app. He implemented it with SwiftUI, MapKit and the free OpenSky API — compass heading from Core Location, live flights fetched every few seconds, and log-scaled map annotations for each aircraft.
The breakthrough was hiding the map: a flat-coloured MapPolygon overlay covers the imagery but sits underneath the annotations, leaving only the planes on a radar. A rotating gradient sweep, moving CRT scanlines via an iOS 17 Metal shader, beeps and haptics finished the toy feeling. Nightly user testing with his toddler drove every decision — including reversing the altitude scaling — and the first verified plane sighting came from the MVP on day three.
Why it lands
- The user was a toddler with one question — where are the planes? — so orientation, sizing and simplicity stopped being nice-to-haves and became the product requirements.
- Inverting the altitude scaling matched how eyes actually spot aircraft, fixing the flat-map confusion where a distant jumbo and a nearby light aircraft looked the same.
- Hiding the map with an overlay kept exact geolocation and live annotations while turning the screen into a toy, because the map was noise, not signal, for a two-year-old.
- Testing nightly with the real user set the quality bar: features shipped only when a toddler could find, follow and enjoy the planes.
What it did
The build write-up hit Hacker News on 27 November 2023 with 1,304 points and 245 comments, where readers shared their own ADS-B receiver and radar builds and the author answered questions in the thread. The app went live on the App Store as a free download, and the OpenSky team replied to his polite non-commercial-use question within twenty minutes.
What you can take
Design for the actual moment of use: because a toddler cannot read a map, he removed it, scaled planes by visibility, and let the compass point to the sky.
Since then
The Hacker News thread on 27 November 2023 drew 1,304 points and 245 comments, with readers sharing their own radar projects — RTL-SDR receivers, dump1090 decoders and custom plane-tracker apps — and the author noting the free OpenSky API has no guaranteed service level, which was fine for a non-commercial toy. The app stayed free on the App Store, and the write-up closed with a roadmap of v2 ideas including zoom levels, aircraft size classes and a "zany mode" that renders UFOs and aliens on the radar.
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