I’ll be honest – when I read about this app I rolled my eyes a tiny bit. The premise was just too simple: Show an egg, tap on the egg a few times and it reveals a cute cartoon animal. But then I remembered Kinder Eggs – bad chocolate egg wrapped around rubbishy plastic toys but worshipped universally by small children – and realised I was missing the point entirely. After all, it doesn’t matter if it’s boring to me.

So I presented it to my team of testers, and the response was universal. “Oooh! Hehehehehe!” One child demanded to know where I had found it, a smaller one just laughed and laughed at ever new animal that was revealed, and the third said they loved it most when each tap on the realistic egg produced a realistic crack. Hatch, it appears, is simply genius as far as the little ‘uns are concerned. This app (although targeted at 2-3 year olds) also pleased a surprising age range with its basic pleasures.

So, considering the creator is a parent who was just trying to find something to entertain his own child while he did the grocery shopping, I think he’s onto a winner here. You could almost say it’s, er, egg-cellent.

You’ll like it because: It offers simple clean fun.

Too bad: The realistic graphics of the egg don’t match the cartoony animals behind it but that’s just being pernickety really.

Cost: $0.99

Age: 1-6

Developer: Phodder