Alphabet Match

Alphabet Match is a letter game for children who are still learning what the letters look like — roughly ages three to five. A letter appears, a friendly voice names it, and two to four hand-drawn pictures wait underneath. Tap the one that starts with it. That’s the whole game. Get it right and the word is spelled out, a star drops into the jar, and the next round begins. It listens to how it’s going. Rounds start with two cards and a small set of easy-to-tell-apart letters. As your child gets them right the choice widens; a run of misses narrows it again. Later on the rounds turn around — the picture asks and the letters answer. Letters that sound alike, like C and K or G and J, are never offered against each other. A real voice, not a robot. Every line in the game is recorded — 458 of them. Nothing is read out by the phone’s text-to-speech. 26 letters, 99 pictures, every one drawn by hand for this game. A sticker book that fills up. Each new word your child finds is kept, and the jar of stars and the book of stickers are there to look through between rounds. The sky above the game is worth poking too — the clouds, the sun, the kite and the plane all do something. For grown-ups, behind a press-and-hold on the sticker book’s title, where small fingers won’t find it: set your child’s name so the game uses it, or narrow the game to the handful of letters you’re working on this week. What it doesn’t do No ads. No in-app purchases. No accounts, no sign-in, no email address. No videos, no links out, nothing to buy and nowhere to wander off to. It doesn’t use the internet at all. The app asks for no network access — the permission isn’t in it — so it works the same on a plane as it does at home. Nothing your child does is sent anywhere, because there is no “anywhere” for it to go: the stars and stickers are saved on the device and stay there.