Android · On-device AI · Not a security tool

A.N.A.Beta 0.1.9

Always Negotiating Appetite

The video plays while they eat. It stops when they don't.

ANA watches — on the phone, and only on the phone — whether a child is actually chewing. Stop, and the video pauses while Ana, a spoon with a face, leans down and taps the plate. Take another bite, and it picks up right where it left off.

Where it came from

Ana said it first.

My wife is called Ana. She is behind most of what I build — not as a bystander, but because every idea gets argued out with her before it gets written. She is also the mother of two, which is the qualification that actually matters here.

“The TV should stop if they stop eating.” Ana — the entire product specification

We enforced it manually first, with an IR remote at the dinner table. It worked. When I said I should turn it into an app, she said the thing that made me actually do it:

“That could work. I think a lot of people would like it.
And I still don't have my own software — only the kids do.” Any married man reads between those lines

So here it is. Her name on the title bar, her idea in the logic, and a spoon named after her doing the negotiating.

Ana
Ana · the specification
Why it lives on a hacking site

Not a security tool. Still a hack.

Everything else in this arsenal targets a network, a credential or a protocol. ANA targets a four-year-old's attention span — the thing a screen quietly takes from a child halfway through their dinner.

Same shape as any other exploit: find the mechanism nobody thought to guard, and put a condition on it. Here the mechanism is the video itself. It used to run unconditionally, whatever happened to the plate. Now it runs only while the eating does.

And it takes AI to pull off. Working out whether a small child is genuinely chewing — as opposed to talking, laughing, yawning, or sitting there with their mouth open and their brain somewhere inside the cartoon — is a real computer-vision problem. That model runs on the phone, in real time, thirty times a second, and never sends a thing anywhere.

An honest word about screens

This is not an argument for screens at dinner.

Our own children's phone and tablet time is extremely limited, and ANA was not built for them. It was built for what you see in every restaurant: adults handing over a phone so the child will sit still, the film running start to finish, the plate going home untouched.

If the screen is already on the table — and for a great many families, at a great many meals, it already is — then it may as well have a price. ANA sets that price at one thing: keep eating.

The child is not punished and never told off. Nothing is taken away. The video simply waits, the way a patient adult waits, until the next bite. The negotiation is the whole product.

How it works

Front camera in, play or pause out.

front camera→ is this child chewing?→ video plays/ Ana taps the plate
01 / PATIENT

It waits properly

Chew, swallow, breathe, chew — normal eating has gaps in it, and ANA does not punish them. You choose how many seconds of nothing counts as stopping. Anything shorter is just dinner.

02 / NOT GAMEABLE

A fake bite doesn't work

Children are excellent at finding the loophole. Waggling a jaw at the camera for half a second will not buy the video back — ANA wants to see real chewing before it presses play.

03 / YOURS TO SET

Parents hold every dial

Behind a PIN: the pause delay, the sensitivity, one profile per child, and a list of allowed videos. The child never searches and cannot leave the video you chose.

[ Ana & the plate — screenshot coming ]
The part that matters most

Nothing leaves the phone. Nothing.

A camera pointed at your child is a promise, not a feature.

ANA does its looking entirely on the device. Each frame is examined by the phone itself, reduced to a single number — roughly “how open is the jaw right now” — and then thrown away. That number is all the app ever keeps, and it never travels anywhere.

  • No video recorded. No photo saved. No frame written to storage.
  • Nothing uploaded — there is no server to upload to.
  • No account, no sign-up, no tracking, no analytics, no ad SDK.
  • Works with the network off, apart from YouTube itself.

This was not a late addition for a privacy policy. It is the reason the app is built the way it is: a cloud vision service would have been easier and was never an option.

Beta

Try it on your own table.

Android 8.0 or newer, 64-bit (every modern phone). Installed by hand — this is not on the Play Store yet.

↓ Download ANA 0.1.9 beta
28 MB · APK · arm64-v8a
Android 8.0+ · free · no account
Signed by Adamantware
Read this before you install This is an early beta and it has not yet been tuned against a wide range of children, kitchens and lighting. It may be too eager to pause, or too slow to notice. It is safe to try and easy to uninstall — but do not expect it to be perfect at your first meal, and please tell us what it got wrong.
  1. Download the APK on the phone itself, or copy it across.
  2. Open it. Android will ask whether to allow installs from this source — say yes.
  3. Launch ANA and set a parent PIN. You will need it to get back into settings.
  4. Add a child, then search YouTube inside the app and tick the videos they may watch.
  5. Prop the phone up so the front camera can see their face, and start the meal.
SHA-256 · 84c8890e5dcf99f2cedd4201a27626739036451e0bb8be8789c615c9eaf2ec50