Samantha John, co-founder of Hopscotch, which was the first coding language designed for iPad, sees the new App Store program as an opportunity to allow kids to do more with Hopscotch for free. “It actually allows us to take some risk that we wanted to take but we were pretty afraid to,” John says. “Specifically around our subscription, … I think it is a good strategy in terms of making money, but it also limits the audience of the app. And we’ve been wanting to walk back that paywall and let people do more for free in the hopes that farther down the line we will have even more loyal subscribers to Hopscotch.”
Started as a way to introduce programming to kids who wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to it, Hopscotch is the brainchild of John and co-founder Jocelyn Leavitt, who attended Apple Entrepreneur Camp’s inaugural class of female entrepreneurs in 2019.
“A key driving principle of Hopscotch is that we really want to respect kids as makers and creators and artists,” John says. “That’s really how we see these kids, and also as coders, so it’s very key to how we think about Hopscotch: How can we make sure that kids are able to make work that is meaningful and important to them?”