A single-tap zero character communication app that just begged to be created

Jul 1, 2014 13:14 GMT  ·  By

You won’t believe Or Arbel’s app until you try it. Yo, as its name implies, lets you Yo others and let them know stuff. Like remind them to do something, or tell them you’re on your way. Even big shot companies could one day use it to alert you of promotions and such.

Arbel’s plans with Yo are nothing short of ambitious. He’s collected upwards of $1 million in funding (€730,000) and moved to Silicon Valley to focus on the app full time, with plans to hire people and expand the service.

He dreams of a day when Yo will be used worldwide by everyone. The app’s description states, “Yo is a single-tap zero character communication tool. Yo is everything and anything, it all depends on you, the recipient and the time of the Yo.”

Arbel offers some examples of how you can use his simple app, which he coded in (hear this) eight hours: “Wanna say ‘good morning?’ just Yo. Wanna say ‘Baby I'm thinking about you?’ - Yo. I've finished my meeting, come by my office - Yo. Are you up? - Yo.” As the developer himself puts it, the possibilities are endless.

The app puts privacy first, so it doesn’t ask you for any personal information, such as your email. All you do is create a user name of your choice and you can start Yo-ing people in your address book (provided that they have Yo installed as well).

“We do have some users who don’t get it and think it’s a joke,” Arbel tells thinkprogress.org. He adds, “You usually understand what the Yo means based on who you get it from and when you get it.” He also notes that, “the way it affects your life is profound.”

Believe it or not, Yo is localized in English, Arabic, Bokmål, Norwegian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

The “Yo” is the same in every language, but the interface changes to your native tongue when you tweak the localization. This is so everyone can set it up quickly and effortlessly and get to Yo-ing as soon as possible.

Intrigued? So were we, and when we tried out Yo for the first time it got really hilarious, really fast. Try it out yourself and see how it goes.

Download Yo for iPhone and iPod touch

Download Yo for Android

Download Yo for Windows Phone