This study investigated the efficacy of three Reading Doctor (RD) apps in raising letter-sound aptitude, phoneme awareness and early decoding ability among children with heightened risk for reading difficulties due to developmental language disorder (DLD). Twenty-four 4-year-old children with DLD, identified through baseline speech-language assessments, in their final term of pre-school participated in this study. In the experimental condition, 14 children participated twice a week in three RD apps for 8 weeks. In the control condition, 10 children engaged in their usual pre-school programme inclusive of teacher-delivered small-group activities related to letters and sounds taught in a non-systematic and non-explicit fashion. No significant between-group differences were identified prior to the implementation of RD. Following instruction, pre-school children in the experimental condition performed significantly better than children in the control condition in phoneme blending ( < 0.001,  1.86), phoneme segmentation ( < 0.001,  1.15) and letter-sound recognition ( 0.001,  1.92), as well as in the number of correct phoneme-grapheme conversions during early decoding attempts ( 0.025,  1.08). Initial evidence suggests that RD software may support code-based reading readiness among pre-school children with DLD prior to school entry.