Normal is the point: behind the redesign of the Voop mobile app

Oct 16, 2026

The new Voop app is live. This week, young people in care across the UK and US will open a clearer, calmer version on their phone. We redesigned it from the ground up around a simple set of principles, with a longer-term vision for where we want to take it next.

Where we started

Voop is a digital safeguarding solution for children in foster and residential care. It combines an eSIM, a mobile app on the young person's device, and a device management platform, giving care teams control over who a child can contact, what content they can access, and how their device behaves. Controls are tailored to each child's care plan, so those with parental responsibility have the right tools for every young person in their care.

But the experience felt one-sided. Care teams had a clear view of everything that was happening, while the app on the young person's phone felt more like a settings menu. When something was switched off, they often didn't know what, or why.

The brief began as a simple reskin. But it quickly became clear the app deserved more than a fresh lick of paint. So we stepped back, imagined what the experience could be at its best, and worked backwards to what needed to ship first.

The principle that shaped everything: normalness as protection

For a young person in care, a phone that looks and feels like everyone else’s means they don’t feel different every time they use it. That’s why Voop devices are regular Google Pixels.

“We made that choice very deliberately,” says James Paul, Co-founder and CEO. “Young people in care already have enough in their lives that marks them out as different. Their phone shouldn’t be one more thing.”

The app needed to live up to that. It should work much like everyone’s mobile provider app: a dedicated space where a young person can see what’s active on their device and why. The old version felt like a set of harsh, unexplained “blocked” states. Now, an overview screen tells them plainly whether everything’s on or a few things are off, rather than leaving them to find out when something doesn’t work.

We’ve already seen what that can mean. One young person had previously refused to use a Voop phone. They’d had a tracking app installed before and deleted it, and being monitored was a real worry. Seeing the new app changed their mind. It was clear about exactly what was happening on their device, and location sharing was something they had a say in. They agreed to give it a go.

For a young person who might otherwise go without a safeguarded phone at all, that’s a big deal.

Working shoulder to shoulder with engineering

Every product team knows about the last 10%. Designs get handed off, built and shipped, and somewhere along the way small things slip: a spacing value off, a loading state skipped, an animation that doesn't quite feel right. Often too small to justify a ticket but together they're the difference between an app that works and one that feels considered.

For something whose whole purpose is to feel like any other app on your phone, that last 10% mattered a lot. If it looked unfinished, it would feel institutional.

The redesign was also an early test of our updated design system. With components built and documented in Storybook, design and engineering had a shared source of truth. Engineers could put screens together from components that already matched Figma, which cut development time, and we could see exactly how each component behaved in code before it reached a device.

“Working directly with the design system also meant we could close handoff gaps ourselves. Rather than writing up small tweaks as tickets, we made the change directly and committed it to GitHub,” says Ed Pentelow, Product Designer. “Claude Code helped us find our way around parts of the Android codebase we knew less well. Refine, test on a real device, commit.”

For engineering, it changed where the time went.

“We weren’t pulled away from bigger work to pixel-push, and Linear stayed focused on the things that genuinely needed our time,” says Tom Jerrum, Engineer. “Design picked up things like loading animations, screen transitions and adaptive icons that sit properly alongside everything else on the home screen. We could focus on the hard problems underneath, and design could own how the app looks and feels, right down to the last detail.”

What's next

This release is the foundation, and the team has already explored where it goes from here.

“We’ve looked at things like explaining why a website or app is blocked at the moment it happens, or letting a young person ask for a little more time,” says Nick Pasha-Gubbins, Co-founder and CTO. “With every release, we’ll keep asking the same question: does this make a young person’s phone feel more like everyone else’s? For the young people we support, normal isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the point.”