Zonova Kids
A Sinhala-first learning app for young children: animals, letters, numbers, colours and shapes, playable offline on any phone.
Visit the live product
Almost everything built for pre-schoolers online is English-first, assumes a fast connection, and arrives wrapped in ads or an account signup. Sri Lankan parents handing over the family phone had little in their own language that simply worked.
Highlights
Eight learning categories covering animals, fruits, vegetables, birds, letters, numbers, colours, shapes and body parts
Sinhala as the primary language rather than a translation layer, with a language switch in the header
Every illustration drawn as original inline SVG, so the art is crisp at any size and costs no image downloads
Installable as a PWA with a service worker, so it keeps working when the connection drops
A full-screen mode that hands the whole screen to the child, and a settings panel for the adult
No accounts, no ads and no tracking: nothing between a child and the next card
The idea
Zonova Kids started from a gap that is obvious once you look for it. A parent in Sri Lanka who wants to hand a three-year-old something to learn from finds an English-language app store, built for fast connections and paid for with ads.
So we built the opposite: a Sinhala-first picture-and-word app with nothing to install, nothing to log into, and nothing to buy.
What we built
The app is organised into eight categories a young child can navigate by picture alone: animals (සතුන්), fruits (පලතුරු), vegetables (එළවළු), birds (කුරුල්ලන්), letters (අකුරු), numbers (අංක), colours (පාට), shapes (හැඩතල) and body parts (ශරීර කොටස්).
Every illustration is original artwork drawn as inline SVG. Nothing is fetched as an image file, which means the art stays sharp on any screen and the whole app weighs almost nothing on a mobile connection.
The chrome is built for two people at once. A full-screen mode hands the entire display to the child with no browser furniture to escape into, while a settings panel and a language switch stay available to the adult.
Built to work anywhere
Zonova Kids is a progressive web app. It installs to the home screen like a native app, and a service worker keeps it running when the connection drops, on the bus, in the village, or wherever the signal ends. It is served from Cloudflare’s edge network, so the first load is fast even on mobile data.
The result
A learning app with no per-child cost, no ads, no accounts and no tracking, that runs on the phones families already have and speaks the language spoken at home.
Building something for a local audience? Let’s talk.
The stack
A learning app that costs nothing per child to run, works on the low-end Android phones most families actually own, and treats Sinhala as the first language rather than an afterthought.
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