Baba

When Wasyl Szeremeta died in 2020, his widow Teodora was left with the daily ritual she had shared with him for sixty years: catching up on news from Ukraine. The TV in the kitchen, a parish bulletin on Sundays, a Ukrainian-language radio show on Saturdays, the Ukrainian Weekly in the mailbox. Stitched together, it was a portrait of home. Apart, on a tablet handed to her by her son Ihor, it was a maze of small text, paywalls, and apps that assumed she was twenty.

Her grandson Alexander Szeremeta, a Ukrainian-American with a deep, lifelong passion for technology, had long wished to use it for something that would make his grandmother’s daily life easier. He started building Baba for her. Baba — Ukrainian for grandmother — is the app he wishes she had: every morning’s news from Ukrainian outlets, her parish’s calendar of saints and feast days, live Ukrainian radio, a library of Ukrainian podcasts, and the cultural anniversaries the Ukrainian-American press still keeps alive — all in one place, in Ukrainian and English, in the text size she actually reads at.

The app launched on the Apple App Store this spring at $1.99. It has no advertising, no tracking, no subscriptions, and no social features. It is the kind of small, dignified product that does not exist for the Ukrainian diaspora and never has.

What’s inside

News from sources Ukrainians trust. Baba aggregates 29 outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda, The Kyiv Independent, Suspilne, Ukrinform, Hromadske, Radio Svoboda, NV, BBC News Ukrainian, DW Ukrainian, RISU (Religious Information Service of Ukraine), and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA. Articles are sortable by category — News, Politics, War, Culture, Faith. There is no Russian state media. There are no Russian-affiliated outlets, no even-remotely pro-Russian sources, and no aggregators of doubtful provenance. There never will be.

A real Orthodox calendar. The Faith section is built around a daily reading view: today’s Gospel and Epistle, today’s commemorated saints, fasting rules, the tone of the week, and a full year-round calendar — in either the Revised Julian or the Old Julian style, because both coexist in diaspora parishes and Baba lets the user pick. The full Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom is included as a reader with audio playback. The full Bible is searchable in both Ukrainian and English. The Ukrainian Orthodox Word magazine archive is browsable. Calendar data is sourced from Orthocal.info, the same database many Orthodox parishes already use.

Live Ukrainian radio, free of the streaming-app maze. Twenty-three preloaded stations: Suspilne radio, Hromadske, Radio NV, Radio Maria Ukraine, Vatican News in Ukrainian, Army FM, Lux FM, Hit FM, Radio Bayraktar, Radio Skovoroda, and a dedicated diaspora station, Radio Nezalezhnist. One tap to play. A health-check runs hourly so a dead stream is replaced without the user knowing.

A curated podcast catalog. Forty Ukrainian-language podcasts (Радіо Свобода’s Діалоги з Віталієм Портниковим, Українська правда’s Кляті питання, Ukraïner, The Ukrainians, Hromadske, NV) and eighteen English-language podcasts (Ukraine: The Latest from The Telegraph, The Making of Modern Ukraine with Timothy Snyder, Explaining Ukraine, War on the Rocks, Krynytsya / The Well from The Ukrainian Weekly).

Designed for the people the App Store usually forgets. Text scales to 1.7×. Buttons have outlines, the way buttons used to. Animations can be turned off. The background is warm off-white, not glaring white. Labels say what they mean — News, Faith, Radio — not icons that have to be guessed at. VoiceOver works throughout. The app was built around the people it serves before it was built around the screen sizes it runs on.

Why this app, and why now

There are excellent Ukrainian news sources, and there are excellent Orthodox calendar apps, and there are diaspora newspapers and radio shows. There has not been a single quiet place where someone’s eighty-year-old mother can find all of it. The diaspora has been making do for thirty years.

For the family member who set up the iPad on Sunday afternoon and walked their parent through three different apps, Baba is the version of that conversation that takes ten minutes instead of an hour, and that holds up for the next decade.

About the maker

Alexander Szeremeta is a Ukrainian-American with a lifelong passion for technology. Baba is the project he had long wished to make for his grandmother. The app is dedicated to the memory of his grandfather Wasyl Szeremeta (1924–2020) and named for his grandmother Teodora. It was built solo, without a venture team or external investment. The full source approach — read-only, ad-free, privacy-first — reflects the editorial values of the Ukrainian-American press the app aggregates from.