For children
A clear place with familiar categories and a search that only finds approved content.
- Continue watching and library
- Channels and playlists
- Click-wheel control
- No comments or trends
SideTube · iOS & Android
In development
Curated videos. A calmer start.
SideTube gives children a video library of their own. Adults set the frame, children decide for themselves what to watch within it.
- No feeds
- No tracking
- Autoplay off
View the concept overview (graphic, earlier planning; screens may differ from the app)
In motion
This is SideTube – on iPhone and SidePhone.
The same feature side by side: iPhone on the left, SidePhone SP-01 on the right. Only openly licensed or public-domain content is shown. Videos load only when started and come straight from this site – no YouTube, no tracking. The apps and captions are in German.
For children
What children see and use.
Home screenApproved channels, new episodes to wish for and recently watched videos at a glance.
Browse a channel, no autoplayA channel opens as a list; the video ends without the next one starting.
Search with the wheelOn the SidePhone letter by letter with the wheel; results only from approved content.
Recently watchedThe video started last sits at the top and resumes with one tap.
For parents
What parents set and decide.
Review and approveBehind the parent lock: open the review list, look at a video and approve it.
Sleep modeAt the set time the app locks and shows when it opens again.
Add a link with previewPasting a link, checking the preview and putting the video on the review list.
Daily limit and quiet timeSetting minutes per day and quiet times in the profile.
Wishes
How children ask for something new and parents answer.
Topic wishThe search finds nothing; the child sends the topic as a wish.
More like thisAsking for more videos like this from the player menu.
New from known channelsNew episodes from known channels stay locked until parents approve them.
Deciding wishesParents answer the wish; the child sees the answer in the app.
The principle
The good stays. The attention machine goes.
YouTube hosts much of what children genuinely want to watch. SideTube turns it into a small, protected space: parents review channels, videos and playlists in advance.
Then children choose on their own. No endless swiping, no trends, no comments. A tool that stops when the task is done.
Everyday use
Clear for children. Accountable for parents.
For parents
A traceable approval process instead of a black box. Decisions can be explained, changed and talked about together.
- Approve, reject or defer
- Age bands and trust levels
- Parent PIN, daily limit and sleep mode
- History of approvals
For families
SideTube sticks to the essentials and treats privacy as a technical default.
- Stored locally
- No accounts and no tracking
- Autoplay off by default
- Open source under MPL-2.0
To be clear
What SideTube does not replace.
Technology does not replace accompaniment. Approvals, daily limit and sleep mode help keep an agreed frame; younger children still need adults who watch along, answer questions and talk about what they saw. Approvals are not complete protection: approved channels publish new videos, product placement inside a video cannot be filtered out, and the embedded YouTube player may show ads depending on the video.
Age bands are presets, not ratings. SideTube's age bands help parents choose. They are not legal age ratings and not assessments by FSK or any other rating body; most YouTube videos carry no official age rating. Official film ratings are themselves not educational recommendations. Whether a video fits is the parents' decision, ideally after watching it together.
Try it
Ready for the next step?
SideTube is being built for iOS and Android. A first Android test build is available to try – explicitly not yet for unsupervised use by children; open items are listed in the release notes. Official downloads for families will follow once the builds are ready.
iPhone & iPad
TestFlight coming
Android
Test build 0.1.0 as APK
Source code
Open on GitHub
Technical details and privacy
iOS
Swift · SwiftUI · SwiftData · WebKit (official YouTube IFrame player) · iOS 17+
Android
Kotlin · Jetpack Compose · Material 3 · Room; key-navigation fork of YouTubeWhitelist
Data sources
YouTube oEmbed / RSS first, Data API as fallback — read-only
Status & privacy
In development; iOS further along, Android functional, device test pending · Privacy — SideTube
SideTube is an independent project and is not affiliated with YouTube or Google. The name YouTube only describes the video platform used.