2012 has been a really exciting year for children’s apps, with dozens of excellent new examples released every month. But we have to admit, we’re starting to be a little overwhelmed.

Most days there are somewhere between three and eight new apps on the App Store that we’d like to write about. Yet for Alice and I – the co-founders of Apps Playground – this is something we do around our day jobs (market research and journalism respectively) and parenting our own two pint-sized apps testers.

Some days we carve out time to write about a big bunch of apps, and other days we barely find time to make a cup of tea. We’re also getting many more press releases about new apps than at the start of the year – I’ve had 62 in December so far alone – as well as requests on Twitter to look at new stuff.

We love to be contacted whether it’s by email or Twitter, we always try to reply, and in an ideal world we’d write about every app that looks good (and, when they don’t, at least give feedback on why we think that). The key phrase there being ‘ideal world’…

So, this is a polite apology to any app developers wondering why we haven’t replied or written about their apps. Sometimes we get bogged down in a backlog, sometimes our inbox is out of control, sometimes tweets whizz past without us knowing, and occasionally there’s a perfect storm of all three!

The good news: Apps Playground is growing fast, and we’re sitting down at Christmas to make plans for 2013, including freeing up more time to focus on the site, write more stories and reply to more developers.

In the meantime, though, please bear with us. We never mean to be rude or uncontactable, and as the site grows, we hope to become more accessible rather than less.