How we started.
Masterclass was founded in Ulaanbaatar in 2024 by a handful of working software engineers who'd noticed the same gap again and again: bright junior developers in Mongolia could write code, but very few of them had ever finished anything. The leap from “tutorial done” to “app in someone's pocket” is enormous — and it's almost never taught.
So we started a small, invite-only cohort. Pick one ambitious app. Build it together over six months. Treat every commit, every review, every Play Store policy check as if it were a paid engagement. By the end, the students don't just have a portfolio — they've lived through release engineering, user support, privacy disclosure, and the unglamorous handful of crises that define real software.
The boring parts are the point.
Anyone can teach a button onPress handler. Far fewer people will sit with you through writing a privacy policy that satisfies Play Store review, or walking you through the third FCM token-refresh edge case. Those are the moments we exist for.
- Real users from day one. Every project is built as if a stranger will install it tomorrow, because eventually one does.
- Mentor-led code review. A senior engineer reviews every pull request. Conversations are recorded for later cohorts to learn from.
- No solo heroics. Students rotate roles — backend, mobile, release, support — so everyone sees the whole pipeline.
- Ship or learn why not. We post-mortem failed releases the same way we celebrate successful ones. The lessons are usually bigger.
How a hobby project became a public app.
In late 2024 we chose parental controls as the cohort's theme — the technical surface (native Android services, screen-time tracking, app blocking, real-time messaging, push notifications, location reporting, anti-bypass protection) gives students a chance to wrestle with most of the hard problems a modern mobile app encounters. It also splits naturally into two distinct apps with very different constraints: a Parent App (React Native, cross-platform) and a Child App (native Kotlin, with deep Android OS-level access).
The classroom version was called “Parent Helper.” It was a teaching tool. Students built it, broke it, rewrote chunks of it, and at the end of the cohort the team did what we always do: looked at it honestly and asked, “is this actually useful to anyone?”
To our surprise, the answer was yes. Several parents from outside the cohort tried it and asked when they could keep using it. So we did what teachers shouldn't usually do: we adopted the student project, hardened the security, wrote a real privacy policy that accurately describes the (substantial) data we collect, and pushed both apps through Play Store review the same way any production parental-control team would. Today the apps live as Prime Kids: Parent Helper and Prime Kids Child, and the lessons from preparing them for the public are now a permanent part of our curriculum.
Prime Kids isn't a commercial product. It exists because the work was good, the need was real, and not releasing it would have wasted everything the students built. Every line of revenue (if any eventually appears) goes back into the next cohort.
Get in touch.
Whether you're a student, a parent who uses Prime Kids, or a reviewer — we read every message.
- Email: mergenfromrabbit@gmail.com
- Based in: Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
- Support & FAQ: /support