This is the short version of how moppet works.
You do not need to read it to use the app. Most of moppet is one or two taps, and the first time you open it there is a short tour. This page is here for the parts that are easy to miss.
On this page
When you first sign in, moppet asks whether you are starting a household or joining one.
moppet sets the time zone from your phone. If your child lives somewhere else, change it in Baby › Edit profile › Time zone. It drives night mode and the timing of reminders.
Today opens on a headline and a sentence about the day so far, then three lines:
Under those sits a row of up to three shortcut buttons, which change with the situation: a wet diaper and a bottle when that is what is likely, a nursing or sleep timer when it is not, and a dose button when a medicine is due. Each one is a single tap that logs the usual answer.
The rest of Today stays empty unless there is something to say. A card appears when a timer has been left running, when a feed looks like it went unlogged, when a dose is coming up, and when you have been away long enough to have missed things.
There are no charts to read and no streak to keep up. If you have more than one child, tap a name at the top to switch between them.
Tap + Log at the bottom of Today. The sheet asks one question, "What happened?", and shows a card per type: diaper, bottle, nursing, sleep, pump, solids, and the rest.
The common entries are already filled in with the usual answer, so a wet diaper or a 4 oz bottle of breastmilk is a single tap. Anything you change, you change on the card before you save. Nursing starts on the opposite side from the last feed, which is nearly always the one you want.
The occasional entries are gathered under Health: a temperature, a medication, a growth measurement, a vaccine, or a doctor visit. A milestone and a plain note have their own cards. Those are all things you record now and then, not several times a day, so none of them sit in your way.
An entry logged with no signal saves anyway. moppet keeps offline entries and sends them the next time you are connected, and tells you how many are waiting.
These three can run as a live timer or be logged after the fact, and the sheet offers both.
A running timer can be paused and resumed, and it appears on your lock screen so you can check it without unlocking the phone. If a timer is left running far longer than it should be, Today offers to finish or discard it rather than letting a nine-hour "nap" sit in the record.
Open Timeline and tap any entry. You can correct the time, the detail, the note, or delete it. Nothing is set in stone. You are keeping a record of a real day, not filling in a form correctly.
The Timeline is also where you go looking for something. Filter by sleep, feeding, diapers or pump, or jump to a specific date to see how a day went.
Go to Settings › Invite a caregiver, then copy or share the code. Whoever you send it to installs moppet, chooses Join with a code, and lands in the same household. The code rotates each time someone joins or is removed, so an old code cannot be reused.
Caregivers show up in Settings › Caregivers with a role:
Remove someone and their access ends immediately. Nothing they logged disappears. It stays part of your child's record.
moppet runs in 20 languages, and each caregiver picks their own in Settings › Language. Your choice follows you across devices and does not change what anyone else sees. The same is true of Clock (12 or 24 hour) and Units (oz and °F, or ml and °C).
The full list is on the FAQ. Some are still awaiting a review by a native speaker, and Slovenian is marked "beta" in the app to say so.
The whole app is translated, reminders included: a notification arrives in the language and the clock format of the person receiving it, not the person who set it up.
Notes go further. A note written in Spanish is offered to an English reader in English, with the original a tap away. Same note, same timeline, read by each person the way they read. That works into all twenty, and the FAQ lists them.
At night moppet switches to a stripped-back screen: one line telling you where things stand, and a few large buttons for the things you actually do at night. Less light, less to read, fewer chances to tap the wrong thing.
It switches on its own after dark. If you would rather it did not, set Settings › Theme to Light or Night by hand.
Turn reminders on in Settings › Reminders, and choose which kinds you want: feeds, naps, diapers, medication. Both choices are yours alone. If you do the diapers and someone else does the feeds, you can each take the ones you are actually responsible for without switching the other person's off. There is a "send a test" button if you want to see one before you trust it.
A fifth switch sits under those four and works differently. It is not about something being overdue: it tells you when another caregiver stops a running timer, so you are not the last to know that the nap ended. That one comes on by default, it names the caregiver and the times the timer covered, and it follows you across every household you belong to rather than being set per child.
A reminder arrives when something looks overdue for your child specifically. moppet starts from the cadence published for your child's age by the health body where they are, then learns your own child's rhythm from what you log. There is a floor underneath it, so a long unlogged stretch cannot push a reminder out of the day, and it goes quiet by itself when a nudge would stop being useful.
That is the same reasoning behind the "Next" line on Today. How “Next” works sets it out in full.
There are two things you might want here, and they are separate. Logging a dose you just gave is one tap from + Log › Health › Medication. Setting up a course, ten days of antibiotics or Tylenol through a fever, is the other, and that is where the reminders and the counting come in.
Start from Health › Medication › Set a schedule. You can type the instruction the way it is written on the label or the way your pediatrician said it, something like "Baby Tylenol, every 4 hours, 0.5 ml for 1 week", or photograph the label and let moppet read it. Either way you land on the same confirmation screen with the fields filled in for you to check: the medicine, the dose, how often, how long, and what it is for.
moppet will not invent any of it. Anything it could not find in what you wrote is left blank and flagged, and it will not create the schedule until you fill it in. It reads what you give it and organizes it. It does not work out a dose.
Once you confirm, every dose time in the course is laid out in advance, from the start to the end date, and shared with the household straight away. Everyone caring for your child sees the same grid.
If a medicine is as-needed and not on a clock, mark it as needed. There is then no grid and no scheduled reminders, because there is no correct time to be reminded of. You log each dose as you give it and the course can stay open-ended.
When a dose comes due, everyone with reminders on gets a notification saying which medicine and how much, in their own language and clock format. Today shows the dose card, and a one-tap button appears in the shortcut row shortly beforehand. It stays there until the dose is dealt with, instead of disappearing at the appointed minute. A late dose is exactly when you most want the shortcut.
Every dose has three answers:
The card carries the count as you go: how many of the course have been given, and when it ends. When the end date passes, the course finishes and the reminders stop on their own. You can also stop one early, which removes the remaining reminders and leaves everything already logged where it is.
Current and past courses are listed in the Baby tab, which is also where you add one without going through the log sheet, or restart something your child has had before.
Two caregivers, a sick child, and nobody certain whether the last dose was given. That is the problem the shared grid solves.
For two over-the-counter medicines, acetaminophen and ibuprofen, moppet can show you the row from the standard chart for your child's weight, so you are not reading the side of the box at 3am. It is a lookup and nothing else. moppet copies out a published row, it never calculates anything, and what it shows is a suggestion you still have to confirm.
It refuses more often than it answers. If you have not recorded a weight, or if your child falls outside the chart, moppet does not guess. It says to ask your pediatrician, which is what the label says too.
The two medicines behave differently, and the labels are why. The US acetaminophen label prints no dose under 24 lb at all: below that it says to ask a doctor, so that is what moppet says, even for an age it would once have answered. The ibuprofen label does print rows from 12 lb, alongside its own floor of six months. We only show what a label prints, including where it prints nothing.
Which chart you get depends on where your child is. US households get the FDA label chart, in pounds. Norwegian households get the paracetamol chart, in kilograms. UK households are pointed at the NHS page for that medicine. Everywhere else moppet stays quiet and defers to your bottle's label, because concentrations differ between countries and the wrong chart could name a dose that does not match the bottle in your hand.
One more thing sits behind the dose box. Where moppet holds a chart row for your child, it checks what you typed against it and asks you to look again if the number looks wrong by an order of magnitude. A slipped decimal is one of the easiest mistakes to make in the middle of the night, and one of the worst.
If you photograph a label, the photo is sent to Anthropic in the United States to read the label. It is not stored with your child's record. Anthropic holds it for up to 30 days and does not use it to train its models.
One caution worth stating plainly, because this is the screen where it matters. Do not let moppet be your only reminder for a dose. Phones lose signal, run out of battery and get left in another room, and notifications are delivered on a best-effort basis by Apple and Google rather than guaranteed by us. Keep whatever backup you would have kept anyway.
moppet is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, not a monitor, and not an emergency service. For any medical question, ask your pediatrician. In an emergency, call your local emergency number. Follow the label, and check every field before you confirm.
When you have been asleep or out, Today shows a "While you were away" card: what happened since you were last in the app, gathered into a few lines and attributed to whoever logged it. You can open it in full, or copy it as text to send to someone.
It is the thing you would otherwise ask about in the doorway.
The Baby tab has a visit summary: feeds and diapers per day, notes and any medication, over the window since your last logged doctor visit. It is built to be read off out loud in an appointment.
If someone needs to see more than that, add them as a caregiver: send them the code from Settings › Invite a caregiver, then set their role in Settings › Caregivers. Viewer lets them read the record without adding to it, and removing them ends their access.
Your record stays readable, downloadable and deletable at any time, free, whether you are paying or not.
Two settings are worth knowing about because they quietly make the app smaller.
If you skipped the tour or want the tips back, both are in Settings › Help.