Monster Mingle vs Light & Color by Tinybop
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Monster Mingle
Design and build your own unique, friendly monster by combining various body parts. Explore magical islands, discover creatures, and interact with the environment in a free-play imaginative landscape. This app encourages creativity and exploration without any goals or objectives.
- Combine diverse body parts (eyes, mouths, limbs, wings, etc.)
- Explore land, sea, and sky environments
- Discover and interact with creatures
- Feed your monster
- Free play sandbox environment
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Build your own friendly monster! Choose different body parts to help explore the world and uncover each unique island. Discover fun creatures, musical scenery and hidden surprises as your monster plays in this magical kingdom. A free play imaginative landscape helps children to be creative, building the creatures they want and learning what is needed to fly high, swim fast or simply walk around. Can you find all 40 body parts? Features: - Combine different eyes, mouths, noses, beaks, arms, legs, wings, fins, horns and bodies - Hop and walk on land, swim under the sea or fly in the sky - Find food to feed your hungry monster - Talk and sing to the other creatures - No goals or objectives, just a free play sandbox Child friendly app: - No in-app purchases - No third-party advertising - No social media Created by Cowly Owl, a British micro-studio creating playful digital toys and educational games. http://www.cowlyowl.com/
Light & Color by Tinybop
Explore the science and art of light and color through interactive experiments and AR features. Discover how light works, mix colors, and see the world through different creatures' eyes. Designed for curious kids ages 4+.
- Explore light refraction and reflection
- Experiment with prisms, mirrors, and lenses
- Mix paint and light colors
- Create rainbows
- Use AR to identify colors
- See through animal eyes
- Interactive vocabulary in 40+ languages
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Have you dreamed of entering a rainbow? How about collecting the colors in your room or seeing through the eyes of a bee? Explore the magic of light and color as you learn at the intersection of physics and art. **2022 Winner of Japan's Digital Ehon Yoichi Sakakihara Prize for outstanding children's media! Discover how light is made, how it moves, and the beauty it creates (hint: colors!). You can mix paint and light, play with prisms and lenses, sort colors, make rainbows, and so much more. Plus — use AR to collect and identify the colors all around you. Light & Color is No.12 in Tinybop’s award-winning Explorer’s Library, a series of apps designed for curious kids ages 4+ to dive into big ideas. Other Explorer’s Library apps include The Human Body, Plants, Simple Machines, The Earth, Weather, Homes, Skyscrapers, Space, Mammals, Coral Reef, and States of Matter. The apps in this series have won Best of the App Store, App Store Editors’ Choice, Parents’ Choice, and Children's Technology Review Editor’s Choice awards. Each Explorer’s Library app teaches kids foundational science. Kids learn by playing, experimenting, observing, asking questions, making guesses, and finding answers. We hope each app inspires conversations between you and your kids and sparks more learning in the world around us. Learn more at tinybop.com. FEATURES + Discover how light bounces, refracts and reflects. + Play with working models of prisms, mirrors, and lenses. + Make rainbows by generating storms. + Experiment with a variety of light sources including candles, incandescent lights, and lasers. + Peek inside a raindrop to learn about how rainbows are created. + Mix paints to create a color wheel (Subtractive RYB mixing). + Explore the science of light by mixing colored lights (Additive RGB light mixing). + Play with color sorting blocks to learn about different color systems. + Collect, capture, match, and name colors in the world around you using AR. + Explore how different creatures perceive the world around them (humans, color-blind humans, nearsighted humans, bees, dogs). + Consider the emotions you connect to different colors. + Interactive text labels in 40+ languages teach vocabulary. + Aligns with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). + Fun for the whole family — play and learn together. + No third-party advertising. + Open-ended activities with no rules. Curiosity and creativity are rewarded. + Original artwork by Jeanelle Mak Petrillo. FREE handbook Our expert-reviewed handbook is full of facts, interaction hints, and discussion questions to support learning in this app, in the classroom, or at home. Download in your app or at: http://tinybop.com/handbooks. Privacy Policy We take your and your child’s privacy very seriously. We do not collect or share personal information about your child, nor do we allow any third-party advertising. When the camera, lidar (TrueDepth), microphone, and other services produce data which could identify you used within an app, your information is neither collected nor distributed outside of the app to Tinybop or other parties. Tinybop does collect anonymous usage data that tells us which parts of the app you visit, how often you visit, and which parts of the app you use the most. This anonymous data is accessible only to Tinybop to help us make better apps and is never bought or sold. Read our complete privacy policy at tinybop.com. Tinybop, Inc. is a Brooklyn-based studio of designers, engineers, and artists. We make toys for tomorrow. We’re all over the internet. Visit us: www.tinybop.com Follow us: twitter.com/tinybop Like us: facebook.com/tinybop Peek behind the scenes: instagram.com/tinybop We love hearing your stories! If you have ideas, or something isn’t working as you expect it to, please contact us: hi@tinybop.com. Psst! It's not Tiny Bop, or Tiny Bob, or Tiny Pop. It's Tinybop. :)
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Light & Color by Tinybop at 4.5 against Monster Mingle's 4.0. Monster Mingle's advantage is monetization model (free vs paid) and review sentiment (89% vs 71%). On price, ratings volume, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Monster Mingle costs $3.99 and Light & Color by Tinybop $3.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Light & Color by Tinybop holds the better App Store score, 4.5 against 4.0. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 28 and 15 respectively. Written reviews complicate that: 89% of Monster Mingle's written reviews are positive against 71% of Light & Color by Tinybop's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Monster Mingle ships an update every 6 months, Light & Color by Tinybop every 8 months. The most recent releases landed on October 26, 2026 and October 25, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Monster Mingle | Light & Color by Tinybop |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $3.99 | $3.99 |
| Rating | 4.0 (28 ratings) | 4.5 (15 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 89.2% of reviews — better | 71.4% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 28 — better | 15 |
| Update frequency | Every 6 months — better | Every 8 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free — better | Paid |
| Best chart rank | #162 — better | #176 |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 | 11.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 300 MB | 422 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Cowly Owl Ltd | Tinybop Inc. |
Customer experience
Monster Mingle
Light & Color by Tinybop
In-app purchases
Monster Mingle
No in-app purchases
Light & Color by Tinybop
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Monster Mingle free?
Is Light & Color by Tinybop free?
Which has better reviews, Monster Mingle or Light & Color by Tinybop?
Do Monster Mingle or Light & Color by Tinybop have ads?
Which is updated more often, Monster Mingle or Light & Color by Tinybop?
Which is more popular, Monster Mingle or Light & Color by Tinybop?
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