Tuck · How it works
TL;DR. Tuck turns two iPhones into a real-time baby monitor. One sits in the nursery, the other stays with you. Live video, audio, two-way talk, cry alerts, and personalized AI lullabies — over Wi-Fi, cellular, or directly via Bluetooth when there's no internet.
Live video, AI scene captions, and gentle cry alerts — captured across a real night. Each clip is a moment Tuck recognized and surfaced to the parent without them having to look.
Download Tuck from the App Store on the iPhone you carry, and on the iPhone you'll leave in the nursery. Any iPhone running iOS 17 or later works as the nursery device — including older models you'd otherwise retire.
Open Tuck on the iPhone you'll keep with you. Sign in with Apple — no password, no separate account. This is the only device that needs to log in.
On the parent device, tap Add nursery. A QR code appears. Open Tuck on the second iPhone, point its camera at the QR code, and the two phones pair in about 5 seconds. The nursery phone is now a paired device — no separate login required.
Lean the nursery iPhone against a stable surface 4–8 feet from the crib, plugged into power. Tuck switches the screen to a dim, ambient night-light mode so it doesn't keep baby awake. The camera and mic stay active.
From the parent device, you see a live video and audio stream from the nursery. Tap the talk button to soothe baby with two-way audio. The connection auto-selects the best path: Wi-Fi when both phones are on the same network, cellular when they're not, or direct Bluetooth Coded PHY when neither is available.
Cry alerts run on-device and learn your baby's pattern over the first few nights. You're notified when it matters; the system stays quiet for the routine sleep noises that don't need you.
From the parent device, tap Lullaby. Pick from 16 tracks across six moods — gentle, dreamy, hush, jazz, and more — and the nursery iPhone plays through its own speaker. Set the sleep timer and Tuck fades the audio out as your baby drifts off.
Each morning Tuck summarizes the night in two lines — when baby slept, how many times they stirred, and any meaningful events. No charts you'll ignore.
Most baby monitors only work on one network. Tuck runs three transport tiers in parallel and seamlessly switches between them so the monitor keeps working in real homes — including the corners where Wi-Fi doesn't reach, the hotel rooms with broken networks, and the flights with no cellular at all.
When: Both iPhones on the same Wi-Fi network — typical at home.
Tuck uses LiveKit's WebRTC stack for the primary connection. Latency is sub-second; video quality is full HD. LiveKit only spins up while the monitor is active, so cost stays minimal.
Delivers: Full 1080p video, full-duplex audio, two-way talk, low latency.
When: One phone is on cellular — e.g., parent at work, baby at home.
Same WebRTC stack, routed via LiveKit's TURN servers. Tuck's bandwidth-aware codec automatically reduces video quality on weak connections so audio always gets through.
Delivers: Adaptive 720p–1080p video, full audio, slightly higher latency than home Wi-Fi.
When: No Wi-Fi, no cellular — flights, cabins, hotels with broken networks, off-grid travel.
Tuck falls back to a custom Bluetooth Coded PHY (S=2) link directly between the two iPhones. Coded PHY trades raw throughput for range and reliability, reaching 30–50 meters indoors through walls. Audio passes natively; video is delivered as a degraded slideshow at ~1 frame every 2 seconds.
Delivers: Live audio, two-way talk, low-rate video, cry alerts. Range: typical apartment or one floor of a house.
The monitor itself runs entirely on your two iPhones. Cry detection, the offline Bluetooth link, two-way talk, and the live video stream never leave your devices in plaintext.
How Tuck's AI works:
Scene understanding requires explicit user consent on first use — Apple requires this for any third-party AI in baby-care apps, and we agree with it.
A baby monitor needs two endpoints: one watching baby, one with you. Both iPhones run Tuck; one is the nursery sender, one is the parent receiver. Most parents already have a primary iPhone and a retired one in a drawer — Tuck repurposes the retired one as the nursery device.
Any iPhone running iOS 17 or later — that's iPhone XS, XR, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, or any SE model from 2020 onward. The nursery phone is plugged into power so battery health doesn't matter; even a five-year-old iPhone with a degraded battery makes a perfect nursery monitor.
No. After QR pairing, Tuck runs as a paired device on the nursery iPhone with a long-lived certificate, similar to AirPlay. You can lock the screen; Tuck's monitoring runs in the background and turns the screen to a dim ambient mode automatically.
Tuck implements a custom Bluetooth Coded PHY (S=2) data link directly between the two iPhones. Coded PHY is a low-data, long-range mode of Bluetooth LE that's been on iPhones since iPhone 11. It reaches 30–50 meters indoors through walls, and carries continuous audio plus a low-rate video feed without any internet connection.
Bluetooth Coded PHY is a Bluetooth LE physical layer that trades data rate for range and reliability. Standard 1M PHY runs at 1 Mbps with ~30m line-of-sight range; Coded PHY S=2 runs at 500 kbps with ~60m line-of-sight (30–50m through walls). Tuck uses S=2 for the offline transport — enough bandwidth for compressed audio plus a thumbnail video, and the extra range comfortably covers an apartment or one floor of a house.
Yes. The Wi-Fi/cellular path uses LiveKit's WebRTC with DTLS-SRTP encryption in transit (the SFU relay sees decrypted frames to forward them, so this is not strict end-to-end encryption); the Bluetooth path uses LE Secure Connections + an additional application-layer key derived during pairing and is end-to-end between the two phones. Tuck doesn't record nursery video to the cloud. Cry-moment snapshots are stored encrypted in our backend for 30 days to power the morning sleep diary; you can disable this in Nursery settings.
Tuck monitors all three transport tiers continuously and uses the best available at each moment. Wi-Fi (when both phones are on the same LAN) is preferred for quality. Cellular kicks in when phones are on different networks. Bluetooth Coded PHY runs as a constant warm fallback so the cutover is seamless when internet drops.
Tuck ships a curated library of 16 lullabies across six moods — gentle, dreamy, hush, jazz, and more. Tracks are age-tagged so the player picks ones that suit your baby's stage. Tap Lullaby on the parent device; the nursery iPhone plays through its own speaker. Set the sleep timer and Tuck fades the audio out as your baby drifts off.
No. Tuck is not a medical device — it does not diagnose, monitor, or treat any medical condition, including SIDS, apnea, or breathing irregularities. If you want breathing-pattern monitoring, look at FDA-cleared devices like Owlet Dream Sock. Tuck's AI describes what the camera sees in plain English; it does not make medical inferences.
Tuck is live on the App Store. iPhone, iOS 17+. Start with a 14-day free trial — no extra hardware to buy.
Important: Tuck is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, monitor, or treat any medical condition, and is not a substitute for adult supervision.