In September, Meta unveiled the Muse Charm: a keychain-sized digital companion with a two-inch screen and an animated character you customise — plus cameras, microphones and an AI that analyses what it sees. It ships in December.
If you are over thirty, your first reaction is the same as ours: that is the keychain virtual pet I carried in my backpack.
Our second reaction was different: the idea is right, and the interesting question is not whether it comes back. It is what it charges the person holding it.
Why a company that size would build this
Because the pocket pet of the nineties solved something no app has solved since: it was small, mine, and dependent on me.
No feed. No other people. No algorithm deciding what I would see next. It got hungry at six in the evening, and that was enough to make me run home.
Thirty years later, a company that lives on attention looks at that and sees a form factor. We looked at the same thing and saw a set of constraints.
The fork
Both paths start in the same place and arrive somewhere quite different.
One puts a camera and a microphone in the object, so the AI can see what you see. It is a coherent decision for what that product wants to be, and the press coverage reacted with the predictable mix of nostalgia and privacy concern.
The other is ours, and it fits in four sentences:
It works offline. The pet lives on the device clock, not on a server. No signal, no problem. Close the app and it keeps living.
There are no ads. And this is not a policy: there is no ad SDK inside the app. That is a different promise from one we could quietly reverse in a later release.
Nobody can talk to your child. No player-to-player chat, no feed, no visible usernames. The only thing they talk to is their own pet — and that conversation is not stored.
The care has a time of day. The beep in the middle of class was the whole point. A pet you attend to whenever you feel like it is a screensaver.
None of those four was free. Working offline meant the pet's state had to be a function of the clock, computed on wake, instead of a background timer. Having no ads meant the business had to add up some other way. And having no social square was a feature we decided not to build, because moderating children talking to strangers is not something you add afterwards.
What this has to do with where we are
As we write this, Tame is being judged in the Shipaton, RevenueCat's annual hackathon. We submitted at the end of September, with the farm, the tractor, the windmill and the screen reader support that landed over the last two months.
The submission is public: Tame a Pet on Devpost.
Results come in November. Until then life goes on: we paused paid media and the app keeps growing on its own, more slowly and without paying for it — which, for anyone building at a calm pace, is the most reassuring metric there is.
And Meta's announcement, strange as it sounds, was a good week for us. When a company that size bets the pocket companion is back, the question stops being "does anyone want this?".
It becomes which version of it people will want to carry.
Tame is free, available in English, Portuguese and Spanish, and has no ads at all. App Store · Google Play