Annie Baby Monitor App

Have you ever gone on vacation or to visit a friend or family member overnight and wished you had remembered to bring along the baby monitor for your kids?  Sometimes the baby monitor is too bulky for the kind of traveling you are doing so it’s just not practical to bring it.  But you still wish you had it, right?

Or how many times have you misplaced the parent unit that belongs to your at-home baby monitor or had the batteries die because you were unable to keep it plugged in all day?  I keep my baby monitor charging cord next to my bed so when I have to carry the parent unit to my computer desk in the main part of the house, the battery dies pretty fast because it’s not plugged in.

As a family, we like to go on cruises.  We tend to pack smaller bags that we can carry onto the ship ourselves, versus having the baggage staff deliver it for us like they do with the large bags.  We don’t like to wait for our bags to get to our room and prefer to keep our belongings with us at all times.  But, smaller bags means we typically have to pack lighter so there’s no extra room for a bulky baby monitor.  Not to mention, electrical outlets are few and far between in a cruise stateroom.

We usually travel with family and get adjoining staterooms or side-by-side staterooms on cruise ships.  If it’s naptime for the kids, we can leave them in our room with a baby monitor and sit next door with the adults.

I recently discovered an amazing solution to our baby monitor problem both at home and while traveling – The Annie Baby Monitor App.  The nice folks over at Annie Baby Monitor sent me a free promo code to try out the app, which normally costs $3.99 for a family account.  I’ve been using the app for a couple of weeks now and I think it’s such a useful tool.  So useful, that I find it important to share it with you all.

With the Annie Baby Monitor you can monitor up to four children at the same time.  You can even track their sleep stats with the handy activity log, which is so different than other baby monitors.

At this time it is only compatible with Apple devices.  

This app is very easy use and easy to pair with other iPads or iPhones.  What I do is place my iPad in the baby’s room as the “child’s unit” and use my iPhone as the “parent unit.”  We typically don’t get text messages or calls on our iPad, which would probably wake the baby up, so that’s why I have it arranged this way.  You can use any combination of Apple devices, though.

The Annie Baby Monitor app is not a video baby monitor so there’s no need to worry about setting in up in such a way so that the baby is visible.  I just place my apple device under the baby’s crib and it works great.

A few of you had asked me if this app was hackable.  I asked the folks over at Annie Baby Monitor and here is the response I got back:

“Hacking audio or video stream is almost impossible by conventional means.  All communication between the child and parent device is securely encrypted, though. The security of our little ones is our top priority – we ourselves are parents as well.  For Annie Baby Monitor we use combination of asymmetric and symmetric encryption of more than sufficient strength. The method we have chosen is combination of industry standards and best practices.”