Have your kids been itching to get their thumbs on an Octonauts app? Ours have, and today is their lucky day – and the same can be said of three other popular CBeebies shows.

Captain Barnacles and his crew are joined by the Alphablocks, Tree Fu Tom and Justin Fletcher’s Something Special in the new (and free) BBC CBeebies Playtime app for iPhone, iPad, Android devices and Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet.

Each show gets its own game within the app, while us parents get a ‘Grown-Ups’ area with educational info and an option to record daily audio messages for our children to listen to within the app – with up to four kids able to have their own profile.

The Octonauts Cadet Training game sees kids piloting the Gup-A through the ocean and then rescuing four sea creatures, while Alphablocks Word Magic gets them tapping on pictures of familiar objects and then spelling them out with the phonetic characters.

Something Special Paint Pop involves decorating Mr Tumble and his friends by popping (thankfully virtual) paint bubbles, while Tree Fu Tom Chuckleberry Chase sees Tom racing through Treetopolis to catch the cheeky Mushas characters.

The app is free, with no advertisements or in-app purchases. There are some links to the CBeebies website (where more than 20 other games can be played in your device’s web browser), but they’re protected by passcodes.

Apps Playground met up with the BBC team behind the app earlier this week in London, and came away very impressed.

The games are colourful and fun, making neat use of features like tilt-controls and the microphone – calling to an Orca whale in the Octonauts game – on your device. The individual profiles for each child, complete with a customisable balloon avatar, are a nice touch too.

The team also said they’ve worked hard to ensure CBeebies Playtime is available for Android devices and Kindle Fire from launch day, rather than just iPhone and iPad.

In answer to the obvious questions: no, you can’t watch actual CBeebies shows through the app, although head of product at BBC Children’s Patrick Healy reminded us that parents can download shows to their device using the separate iPlayer app, or access CBeebies podcasts from the iPlayer Radio app.

Will other shows get games in the CBeebies Playtime app at some stage? “This will have a life expectancy over the next 12-18 months with new games, new brands and new activities,” said Healy, although his colleague Joe Godwin – director, BBC Children’s – said that keeping the file-size of the app manageable is a consideration.

“We don’t want people to have to update this every five minutes, and if we try and take something out to put something else in, with this audience there’s a lot of hoo-ha potential!” he said.

This isn’t the first CBeebies app: there’s already the CBeebies Magazine app for iPhone and iPad, which is made by a different bit of the BBC – its BBC Worldwide commercial division.

Meanwhile, we’ve written about apps for individual shows including Mister Maker, Rastamouse, Mike the Knight, Timmy Time, Grandpa in My Pocket, Tinga Tinga Tales and Dipdap, as well as Justin Fletcher’s Justin’s World apps.

CBeebies Playtime will sit alongside those apps rather than replace them: when shows are made by independent production companies, as they often are, they’ll still be able to release their own apps.

Anyway, count us impressed – and not just because we’ve finally got a positive answer to our two sons’ demands for interactive Octonauts on the family iPad! Such high expectations could have led to disappointment if the app was underwhelming, but it’s well-crafted and fun.

BBC CBeebies Playtime is a free download for iPhone and iPad on Apple’s App Store, it’s free for Android devices on the Google Play store, and free for Kindle Fire on the Amazon Appstore (we’ll update the latter with a direct link as soon as we get it). Note, the app is only available here in the UK.

Buy Apps Playground’s 100 Best iPad Apps of 2013 e-book – £1.99 from Apple’s iBooks Store