Why LeapPad couldn’t keep up when tablets became kids’ default

The LeapPad came from Jim Marggraff, LeapFrog’s in-house inventor, who spent three years developing it before it launched in 1999. Think of it as a cross between a talking book and an educational video game console. A child placed a printed book on the device, touched a word or picture with the attached stylus, and the LeapPad read it aloud, sounded out letters or played a game.

Parents loved it because it looked like reading, not screen time. Kids loved it because it talked back. It won Toy of the Year from the Toy Manufacturers of America, and Marggraff’s carefully even voice became the soundtrack of a generation of playrooms.

The money followed. Powered mostly by the LeapPad and its books, LeapFrog’s sales rose from $160 million in 2000 to $680 million in 2003, making it the fastest-growing toy company in history at the time.

The LeapPad’s real business was the stream of books and cartridges sold separately, which is also why it got expensive for families. That model only works while kids keep wanting more of the same.

By 2004, they wanted something else. Sales cooled as Hasbro, Mattel and VTech flooded stores with their own learning toys. LeapFrog was also dealing with the fallout from its rapid growth and an internal scandal. It poured close to $100 million into its next big idea, a $99 talking pen called the Fly aimed at kids aged 8 to 14. The result was a management shake-up, a net loss for 2004 and a falling share price. The original LeapPad never had a successor that hit as hard.

In 2011, with the iPad already in stores, LeapFrog reused the famous name for a kids tablet. The new LeapPad cost $99.99, had a 5-inch touchscreen, a camera, a microphone and a stylus, and was aimed at children aged four and up. Its reading apps adjusted to a child’s level, telling each story in three versions from simple to harder. It went on sale in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland, and it again won Toy of the Year honors, this time from the Toy Industry Association.

Early results looked great. In the first quarter of 2012, LeapFrog’s revenue rose 81% from a year earlier to $72 million, driven by the tablet. Then-CEO John Barbour said the company would turn its app store into a curated market for children’s content, sharing revenue with outside studios such as Sesame Workshop. If that sounds like Apple’s playbook, it was.

Barbour also said what was coming. He told analysts a wave of cheap Android tablets was about to hit, and that LeapPad might one day compete with parents’ own phones and tablets. His argument was that nobody else had LeapFrog’s depth of learning content in a device tough enough for small children.

LeapFrog kept upgrading. The LeapPad2 arrived in 2012 at $100, double the memory and with front and back cameras. A few years later, the LeapPad Platinum had a 7-inch screen, a 1 GHz processor and more than 800 paid apps in the LeapFrog App Center.

But it still ran LeapFrog’s own closed system. It could only run LeapFrog-approved games, some apps cost up to $25, and its web browser showed only pre-approved pages. One reviewer’s four-year-old, used to an old iPad 2, kept asking why he could not just ask Google out loud like on a parent’s phone. That question sums up the problem. Children compared the LeapPad to the device in mom or dad’s hand, and the LeapPad lost.

The things that made it safe, a walled-off store and curated content, also made it feel small next to a tablet that could play YouTube, run any game and grow with a child. And once a family owned an iPad, a second, kids-only screen was a hard sell.

The LeapPad’s story is a useful checklist before you buy a learning device:

• Count the ongoing costs. Cheap hardware with pricey add-on content can cost more over time than a regular tablet.
• Ask how long it will last your child. A device aimed at four-year-olds may be ignored by seven.
• Weigh safety against flexibility. A closed system keeps out ads and strangers, but a mainstream tablet with good parental controls can do the same and keep up as kids grow.
• Check durability. The one thing LeapFrog always got right was hardware built for drops and sticky fingers. A sturdy case does that job for a regular tablet.

None of this makes the LeapPad a failure. For a few years it taught millions of children to sound out words, and it showed toy makers that parents would pay for learning tech. It just could not stay special once every home had a better screen.