Connected by love. Private by design.

When the Wi-Fi blinks.

No frozen picture pretending to be live

Routers restart and Wi-Fi blinks. After a short drop, your phone reconnects to the nursery on its own. If it can’t, it says “Connection lost — not live” instead of showing a still picture, plays a sound and vibrates, and reminds you about every minute until the connection is back. A chime plays once it is.

Good to know: while it’s disconnected, other alerts can’t reach your phone. When your phone receives the nursery phone’s Stop, the reminders end; if it can’t confirm the Stop, it tries to keep reminding you about every minute until you tap Stop watching. Closing BubCue on your phone stops the reminders. If the nursery phone switches off or BubCue is closed on it, it doesn’t restart on its own.

In the small hours. You’re asleep, at last.

A tone when the nursery gets loud

When sound in the nursery stays above the level you chose, your phone plays a tone, vibrates and shows a card, even with BubCue in the background. You decide how sensitive it is, how long the sound must last and how much quiet time comes between alerts.

Cry alerts listen for sound that resembles crying, on the nursery phone itself.

Good to know: sound alerts respond to sound level, not crying, and cry recognition is experimental and can miss or mistake sounds. Your phone’s volume, Focus or Do Not Disturb can stop you hearing an alert.

Across the hall. Across the country.

Invite your people to watch

On the nursery phone, tap Share invitation and send the link in a message or an email. Grandparents in another city, the babysitter on date night or your partner at work install BubCue, open the link, tap Open BubCue and watch. Under our current plan, invited viewers don’t need their own subscription.

They can watch, listen and talk to the baby. Only the nursery phone can stop monitoring or invite someone else, and it lists every connection, so you can remove a viewer who joined in the BubCue app.

Good to know: two viewers can watch at a time, and your own phone counts as one. Each invitation works for one phone and ends when monitoring stops, so you send a new one next time. Sharing an invitation and watching from somewhere else both need internet, and some networks don’t allow the direct connection BubCue uses, so it may not work from everywhere. Anyone with an unused invitation can join, so send it only to people you trust.

The baby’s down. Dinner’s on.

Picture-in-picture over your other apps

Switch to your recipe, messages or maps, and the live video keeps playing in a small picture-in-picture window on top, with the sound on. Lock your phone and you still hear the room.

Good to know: in the nursery, an iPhone stays open with its screen on (locking it pauses monitoring), while an Android phone can monitor with its screen off. Some phones let you turn the small window off in their settings. Alerts don’t appear as lock-screen notifications, and closing BubCue on your phone stops its sound and alerts.

Lights down for bedtime.

Made for dim rooms

Low-light assistance adjusts the camera automatically when the phone supports it. The nursery phone’s own screen stays near-black, and can dim its preview further, so it doesn’t light up the room.

Good to know: phone cameras have no infrared night vision. Some light, such as a night light, is still needed. How well it works varies between phone makers and models.