BubSync launched on 5 September 2026. The Android app is live on Google Play, the web app works in any browser, and iPhone users can join a free TestFlight beta with no invite needed. At launch, the App Store listing was still in review.
It is the first of our products to reach the public, and the most personal. A lot of the examples in our series on building software from Australia came from building it. This piece is the other half of that story: not how it was built, but why it exists at all.
The gap in the middle of the night
BubSync was started by Ashley Rowe and Sarah Brumbley, who are parents of two with a third on the way.
When their youngest daughter was born, Sarah was on maternity leave and Ashley was working full time, so they split the night. Sarah took the late shift. Ashley took the early mornings. The trouble was the stretch in between.
Ashley would wake at 3am to a baby who needed something and no idea what had already happened. When was the last feed? When was the last nappy? Had she slept for twenty minutes or two hours?
The answers existed, somewhere in a thread of text messages sent by someone half asleep. Text messages are a poor database. They arrive out of order, they cannot be searched with one hand at 3am, and they are mixed in with everything else a family says to each other in a day.
The baby tracking apps they tried did not fix it, because they were built around one primary parent with everyone else invited in as a guest. That is not how their house worked, and it is not how most houses with a new baby work.
A handwritten page for the grandparents
The second prompt came when they left their daughter with her grandparents and wrote the care instructions out by hand. That page became two features.
- Care essentials. Instructions and preferences written once and kept with the baby’s record, instead of rewritten on paper every time someone else is looking after her.
- Handover links. A link that works in any browser for 24 hours, with no account and no app to install, showing the latest feed, sleep and nappy change alongside those essentials.
A grandparent does not want to install an app. They want to know when the baby last ate.
What shared care actually needs
Between the 3am gap and the handwritten page, the requirements more or less wrote themselves:
- One diary that everyone writes to, so there is exactly one answer to “when was the last feed”.
- Equal access for both parents. Neither of them is the account owner with the other as a guest.
- Room for everyone else. Grandparents, babysitters and carers, each on their own device.
- One subscription for the whole village, not one per caregiver.
- Offline first, because 3am is when the signal is worst and patience is shortest.
- Private by default, which we come back to below.
On top of that sit the everyday tools: logging a feed, sleep, nappy or pumping session in a tap or two, growth charts plotted against the WHO Child Growth Standards, a dimmed night mode for logging in a dark room, and trends that turn a week of entries into a pattern you can actually see.
“BubSync is about reducing the mental load of baby care. Instead of repeating the same updates, trying to remember the last feed, or treating one parent like the default, we wanted a shared system that keeps the whole village in sync.”
— Ashley Rowe, co-founder
The part a logbook misses
Across two children, Ashley and Sarah had tried notepads and text threads, and both failed the same way. What they learned was that a tracker which only records feeds and nappies misses the reason anyone is doing any of this.
So BubSync also keeps Memories: photos, collages and milestones, shared only with the family members you choose. It turned out to be the feature Ashley opens most often away from home. A moment captured at home, seen in the middle of a workday, does more for a working parent than any chart.
AI that starts from your baby, not an average one
The AI hub builds day schedules, suggests sleep rhythms and play ideas, offers milestone guidance and answers questions, all grounded in the family’s own logs.
That grounding is the point. The hard part of a question at 3am is rarely general knowledge. It is remembering what your own baby did yesterday, and the day before, and whether tonight looks like either of them. A model that can read the log can help with that. It does not replace a GP or a child health nurse, and it is not built to pretend otherwise.
Tested somewhere with worse signal than a nursery
A family trip to the United States turned out to be the most useful test it got. Planes, trains and hotel wi-fi meant long stretches with patchy connections or none at all, and it did not matter. Every entry saves on the phone first and syncs when the network comes back, so the logging carried on and the shared timeline caught up by itself.
We wrote about the engineering behind that in designing for distance. The short version is that connectivity is an input, not an assumption. The holiday was where that stopped being a principle and became the feature we would least want to give up.
What we share, and what we do not
You may have noticed that this piece does not name any of the children. That is deliberate, and it is the same rule the product is built on.
Parents decide what is shared and who sees it. Photos have their embedded EXIF metadata stripped, which is where a phone records details such as where a picture was taken. Family data is never sold and never used for advertising. For a product that holds feeding times and photos of someone’s child, that is not a policy detail. It is the product.
We have written about how we think about personal information more generally in where your data lives. BubSync’s own privacy policy says specifically what it collects and where it goes.
Free to start
BubSync is free to use. An optional Premium subscription adds unlimited children, AI insights, extended history and live notifications, and one subscription covers the whole family rather than each person caring for the baby.
Prices differ by store and by country, so current plans are published on bubsync.com rather than repeated here.
The honest bit
Building an app is hard. Building the business around it is harder, and more expensive than the app. There were several points between that first night of tinkering and launch day where stopping would have been the sensible decision.
What kept it going was the same thing that started it. This is not a problem one family has. It is a problem nearly every family has when a new baby is being cared for by more than one person, and most of them are still solving it with text messages.
How it got here:
- November 2025. Tinkering starts, at 3am, between feeds.
- February 2026. The decision to build it properly.
- April 2026. The business is registered in Brisbane.
- 5 September 2026. Live on Google Play and the web.
- October 2026. Baby number three is due, which means the most thorough testing BubSync will ever get is about to begin.
Get it
- Android: BubSync on Google Play
- Web: app.bubsync.com, in any browser
- iPhone: a free TestFlight beta with no invite needed, linked from bubsync.com, which lists every way to get the app.
Help and feedback go to support@bubsync.com, which is read by the people who built it. Journalists will find logos, screenshots and a media contact in the press kit, and the longer version of this story is on BubSync’s own site.
The last piece in our series ended by saying the only software we are interested in building is the kind that is still here in ten years. This is the first one out the door.