For years, children’s toys have been trapped in a binary, marketed towards girls or boys and specific races or ethnicities. Creating characters and experiences that showcase diversity has been quite the challenge. But one mobile-first kids brand has made narrative and character diversity a priority in the development of its apps. Toca Boca recently announced the release of its 34th app, Toca Life: Vacation.
Indicative of a wide range of characters and families, children will be able to play with characters that truly represent themselves while showcasing the multifaceted nature of our world. Thanks to an internal diversity team at Toca Boca, each of this company’s dozens of apps seek to reflect a myriad of races, ethnicities, languages, religions, abilities, social classes, and orientations. Because when it comes to creating a tolerant society, we’ve gotta start them young.
Last week, Toca Boca released Toca Life: Vacation, and already the game has claimed the No. 2 spot among paid apps on the App Store for the iPhone, and the No. 1 spot on the iPad. With this app, Toca Life says, “Kids can now feel the excitement of running through the airport to catch a flight, jumping into a hotel bed, or digging for treasure on the beach any time they want.” So if you want to give your child a vacation this summer, this prove to be a good frugal option.
As with other Toca Life apps, children maintain full autonomy over their own stories. Featuring four locations and a cast of diverse characters, users can tell any story they want and engage in a plethora of activities.
“The Toca Life series has a very enthusiastic fan base with more than 900,000 kids playing with the apps each month,” said Petter Karlsson, Play Designer at Toca Boca. “From the more than 50,000 feature requests we received, it was clear that kids wanted different elements of a travel experience. The resulting app included locations kids will love, filled with engaging play experiences and surprises.”
Designed specifically with kids in mind, there are no in-app purchases or third-party advertising, nor are there rules, levels, or high scores. Just unadulterated fun.
Toca Life: Vacation is available for $3 on the App Store, Google Play, and Amazon.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.