What's New in MiniCoder — August 2026

It has been a long stretch since the May notes, and a lot of it went into things you can actually see: MiniCoder now speaks twelve languages, grown-ups have their own dashboards, guests stop losing their work, and the whole app got a proper visual overhaul. Here's the tour.

🌍 Twelve languages, including right-to-left

MiniCoder now speaks English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Hindi, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Persian, Arabic and Turkish. Persian and Arabic read right-to-left, and the entire interface mirrors properly for them — menus, buttons, cards, dashboards, the lot.

The app ideas we suggest are now written for each language rather than translated from English, so a child typing in Korean or Turkish gets ideas that actually sound natural. And the language you build in stays independent from the language of the interface: describe your app in any language you like.

👨‍👩‍👧 A dashboard for parents

Parents now have a Family Dashboard. Create a login for each of your children, see the apps they have built, open and play any of them yourself, and disconnect a child whenever you want.

If a child signs up on their own and tells us they are under 13, we ask for a parent or guardian's email address and send you a link to set up your free parent account and connect to theirs. That email is currently written in English, whatever language your child is using — we know, and it is on the list.

🎓 A dashboard for teachers

Teachers get a Classroom Dashboard: create a class, share its join code, and see everyone who has joined along with the apps they have made. Students with a MiniCoder account enter the code on the Join a class page.

One honest caveat: for now, point your students at that page directly. The in-app shortcut to it only appears once a student has already joined their first class, which is not much help the first time.

📄 Proper pages for grown-ups

There are now real For Parents and For Teachers pages that explain what MiniCoder does for your family or your classroom — what it offers, how it works, examples of what children actually build, and answers to the questions we get asked most.

Already have a MiniCoder account? You can turn it into a parent or teacher account with one button on those pages instead of registering all over again. The account needs an email address on it, it cannot be a child's account, and the switch is permanent.

💾 Your work stops disappearing

This was the biggest fix of the summer, and it had several parts.

• Guest creations follow you in. Sign up or log in and everything you built as a guest comes with you — we now confirm it by name ("We saved your 4 creations!") instead of a generic welcome. Logging into an existing account used to lose that work entirely.
• Save then sign up, and the save finishes itself. No second dialog, no second click. It just tells you it landed in My Creations.
• A workspace for guests. Building without an account now gives you a "your creations this visit" panel with everything you have made on this device, and one button that keeps all of them at once.

The nudge to make an account also learned some manners. It waits until you have really got going — after your first change to an app, your second creation, or reopening something you made — appears at most twice a visit, and saying "not now" buys you real silence.

⚡ Fewer interruptions while you build

A "slow down" limit that was meant to be per-person was being applied to everyone at once, because of a proxy misconfiguration on our side. One busy classroom could throttle every visitor in the world. That is fixed: the limit is now genuinely per person.

And if you do build faster than it allows, you get a friendly countdown in your own language instead of a wall — the button comes back on by itself.

🤖 Better answers when the AI struggles

MiniCoder no longer hands a child a wall of text where their app should be. If the builder replies with an apology instead of an app, or returns something that is not actually a working page, it retries rather than shipping it. Ideas that are genuinely impossible get scaled down to the best playable version instead of failing outright.

When our app builder itself is having trouble, kids now see a calm message in their own language — "our app builder is taking a short break, try again in a few minutes" — rather than a raw technical error. A busy service is also no longer blamed on how fast the child was going.

🎨 A new look

MiniCoder had grown into a functional app that looked like one. It has now been rebuilt on a single design system, so the landing page, the Create screen, your creations, the App Store and the grown-up dashboards finally look like the same product.

• Create / Play / My Creations is a clear switcher at the top instead of thin underlined tabs.
• Every creation gets a cover. My Creations and the App Store read as a shelf of things you made rather than a list of rows.
• The Create screen is now the centre of the app, with a proper prompt box and idea chips instead of a form.
• Phones work properly. The header used to run off the edge of a 390px screen and cut the Register button in half.

♿ Small things that matter

• Every button and input shows a visible focus ring again when you navigate by keyboard. Dozens of them had quietly lost it.
• The loading spinner keeps turning for people who ask for reduced motion — it used to freeze, which made a working app look stuck.
• Generating now announces itself to screen readers instead of passing in silence.
• The feedback button sits on every page, including the parent and teacher areas, and lets you choose between reporting something and suggesting a feature.
• The App Store gained a language filter, and card dates now show when an app was published rather than last edited.
• On your own published app the star is a read-only score labelled "stars from other creators" — it was previously a button that appeared to do nothing.
• Creators stop getting a fresh "you got a star" email every time the same person un-stars and re-stars. One notification per person, per app.

☕ Supporting MiniCoder

MiniCoder is free for kids and stays that way. If it has been useful to your family or your class, there is now a small Support MiniCoder link on the landing page, the grown-up pages and the Parent Portal that lets you chip in towards the running costs.

It is deliberately only on grown-up screens. It will never appear in a child's creating flow, and never on the screen a child sees when they have used up their creations for the day — that screen shows a friendly "you've built a lot today!" note with no payment talk at all.

What we said last time

In May we said classroom features, in-app notifications and leaderboards were coming. Classroom features arrived in part — dashboards and join codes are live, while the teacher-led session tools are still being tested. In-app notifications and leaderboards did not happen; they are still on the list, and we would rather say so than quietly drop them.

As always, the apps you make are what keep this going. Tap 👍/👎 after your next generation, or use the feedback bubble — every note reaches a real person.