My son was learning to read, so I started building one for him. About six months earlier I had tried making it in Figma Make and the tools could not carry it; this autumn I came back to it with the content I had already gathered.
Looking for something to use, I found that Ukrainian children aged four to six had no app that taught reading the way their own schools teach it. There are good apps for English, and generic alphabet apps translated into Ukrainian, which is not the same thing: they present letters alphabetically and say letter names instead of sounds, so a child ends up reading MAMA as "em-a-em-a". The Ukrainian national primer has a worked-out order - the letters that immediately make real words come first - and no app followed it.
The second reason is the children who left. Between 5.7 and 5.9 million Ukrainians now live abroad. Their children hear another language at school all day and are learning to read a language they do not hear outside the home - often before they can read it at all.
I also wanted to answer a question I kept asking as a parent: why does a children's app need an account, an ad network and a server? In a 2019 study of 135 children's apps, 95% carried advertising, and apps labelled "educational" were no better. Bukvyk has no backend whatsoever - nothing about the child leaves the device, because there is nowhere for it to go.
Schools get everything free, forever. One purchase at home pays for every classroom.
Bukvyk is thirteen small games, each one step on the way from a single sound to a whole story.
A child starts with letters and syllables: the app says the sound [m], not the letter name "em", because a child who learns names ends up reading MAMA as "em-a-em-a". Letters arrive in the order the Ukrainian national primer teaches them, not alphabetically - the primer starts with the letters that immediately make real words. Closed syllables are taught in pairs: АН above НА, the same two letters reversed, because that is how blending becomes easy.
Then whole words: which letter does this word start with, how many syllables, build the word from syllables, read the word and pick the picture. Then sentences: true or false about a picture, which word is missing. Then 193 short stories and 70 fairy tales to read.
Every word, syllable and sound is voiced, so a child who cannot read yet is never stuck. Pictures are the same on every device, drawn from one bundled set, because a child recognises the picture before the word.
At school it runs in a browser: the teacher opens one link on a laptop with a projector or an interactive whiteboard. Nothing to install, no accounts, any number of devices. At home it is an app on a phone or tablet, fully offline.
There is no backend. Nothing about the child is collected, sent or stored anywhere but the device: no analytics, no ads, no sign-up.
Entirely by letters, one school at a time.
The app reached the stores in October 2026. Since then I have written to about 5,000 schools in 60 countries - Ukrainian schools at home, and Saturday schools, cultural centres and community schools abroad. Each letter is a separate letter with that school's own name in it and its own access link; no mailing lists, no bcc.
As of 26 October 2026, 375 schools have opened their link: 309 in Ukraine and 66 in 23 other countries - Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, Spain, the UAE, Hungary, Greece, Austria, Czechia, Poland, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Moldova, Singapore, Japan and Australia.
I count openings, not letters sent, because a letter proves nothing. Of the schools that open the link, about 40% come back the next day and 9% are still returning a week later.
Beyond schools, the spreading is quiet: regional children's libraries, in-service teacher training institutes and inclusion support centres have been written to this month. There is no advertising budget, no growth team and no referral scheme. One person writes the letters.
What I have not done yet, deliberately: paid promotion, and asking teachers for public testimonials. The first is planned for late November; the second feels premature while schools have had the app for only a few weeks.
The most useful changes came from teachers, and they arrived fast.
A first-grade teacher in Kyiv wrote that the letter order was wrong: alphabetical order teaches a child to look words up, while the national primer starts with the letters that immediately make readable words. She was right. The app shipped three selectable orders the next day - the primer's order, alphabetical, and a third one that begins with letters shaped like their Latin counterparts (А, О, І, К, Т, М) for children abroad who already read in another script.
The same release added closed syllables. The primer teaches them before blending: АН before НА. My first attempt took closed syllables from the dictionary and produced fragments that mean nothing to a child. The second went back to the primer itself: nine consonants by six vowels, the same letters as the open syllables, simply reversed.
A teacher also reported that background music competed with the spoken word, so the music now fades while a word is being read and returns afterwards - otherwise teachers raise the volume and deafen the class.
Smaller things, same origin: counting only active time toward screen limits, so a tablet left on a table does not burn through a child's day; and a settings switch for letter order placed inside the alphabet screen rather than in a separate menu, because that is where a teacher looks for it.
For a school: write to hello@bukvyk.com and say which school you are. You will get your own link, in the form app.bukvyk.com/CODE, usually the same day. It opens in any browser - nothing to install, no accounts, no registration, any number of devices. It is free forever, with all thirteen games, and it renews with one button on the page itself. There is also a form at bukvyk.com/class if you prefer that to a letter.
For a family: install Bukvyk from bukvyk.com/app, which opens the right store. Five games and six fairy tales are free permanently. The rest - eight more games and 64 more tales - is unlocked by a single purchase of $4.99, with no subscription. That purchase is what keeps the school version free.
If a family cannot afford it, the school version has a button that generates codes for parents: the teacher says how many are needed for iPhone and how many for Android, copies them into the class chat, and those families get the full app free forever.
For anyone who just wants to look: bukvyk.com/teachers shows the letter orders and lesson scenarios, and bukvyk.com explains the rest.
The app is entirely in Ukrainian. If you do not read Ukrainian but want to evaluate it, write to me and I will walk you through it.
