The user controls and records the movement of performers (who can be dressed as pizzas, poops, or ice creams, if you like) in time to a selection of specially written tunes, and then watches their troupe of (up to) three perform a show. Toca Dance is its makers' 31st app (according to their own website), and-as its name implies-is a dance simulator of sorts. For example, in Toca Dance, it doesn't have this big American Idol type of feeling-it's a lot more 'homemade.' Those are too perfect we want our things to have flaws, and to be a bit weird, while also referencing the everyday. Not everything should be like Disney and Apple. We were positioning ourselves as toys-you tap it, touch it, and it will reveal itself, and just like all good toys you don't need instructions. We have no feelings of failure, or anything like that.

He, alongside Björn Jeffery, set up Toca Boca in 2010, releasing their first apps, Toca Tea Party and Helicopter Taxi, in March 2011. 'When we founded the company, we set up principles for what we wanted our apps to be like,' co-founder Emil Ovemar tells me.

And even if you don't have kids biting at your ankles or swinging from the light fittings, right now or any time soon, you need to know about them. Toca Boca, based in Stockholm, is a small team of innovators determined to revolutionize how apps for children, predominantly those under age ten, are researched, produced, and promoted. One studio held every position in its top ten, ahead of anything by Disney, or any other company you immediately associate with tween-appeal (and below) products. On Christmas Day 2015 on Apple's App Store, the shop's second-busiest day of the year, one company dominated the kids category paid app chart.

Toys toca boca