Since we launched Helicopter Taxi — our very first app — we have produced over 20 high quality digital toys that have been downloaded more than 70 million times. Our overall experience from creating digital toys for kids tells us that the time has come to let Helicopter Taxi fly on to new adventures.

Why? It has been downloaded more than 250,000 times since 2011 and it is still a popular toy — but it does not meet the high standards for quality and user experience that we’ve developed since we began. During the past four years we have learned and evolved within play and now have a better understanding of what a digital toy from Toca Boca should be like.

At Toca Boca, we are devoted to changing the role of play on digital platforms. We do that by creating digital toys that answer to a large range of criteria, some of which include:

Open Ended.
We don’t steer the direction of play or the experience a child has when playing one of our apps.

Intuitive to Use.
Kids should be able to understand and enjoy our apps without guidance from a grown-up.

Accessible to a Global Audience.
With downloads in more than 160 countries, we want our digital toys to be as international as possible, without spoken or written language in the actual toy.

We want to ensure that kids and parents who choose to play with one of our products know they’re getting what they’ve paid for. So when we realized Helicopter Taxi lacks too many of the above quality measures, we decided to cancel it altogether.

As we let our beloved helicopter fly into the sunset I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the team who created the first ever Toca Boca app: Jens Peter de Pedro, Emil Berner and Andrey Zhukov. Their work laid the ground for what Toca Boca is today.

And to all our Helicopter Taxi fans, thank you for supporting us since the beginning. If you already have the app it will not disappear — you can continue to enjoy it as long as you don’t change devices.

We will remove Helicopter Taxi from the App Store on October 13.

Emil Ovemar
Co-founder and executive producer at Toca Boca