There's a new app, maybe you've heard of it, yo. No, seriously, that's the name of the app, Yo. As in, "Yo dawg." Yo does one thing, and one thing only: it sends a contact a notification of "Yo." No message attached to that, no images, no context, just "Yo from RENERITCHIE". It took eight hours to code, and yet somehow it's sweeping the globe in monosyllabic fashion, and even more inexplicably has raised a million dollars in funding to do… what? Hell if we know.
Yo's interface is absurdly simple. Big, bright, colorful buttons with your contacts' user names. Tap one, they get a Yo. That's it. Of course, they'll need to have Yo installed as well. Hell, even Yo's icon is simple: it's purple. Yo is so simple that it was initially rejected by the iOS App Store reviewer because they thought it was incomplete. Nope, turns out it's as feature complete as it could ever be.
So where does Yo go from here? That's a good question. Chances are the pure idiocy of the concept will lead to it being a flash in the pan. Yo only works if you understand the context. The message itself has no context, it's a call for attention. Some of the use cases being batted around include, say, FIFA sending you a Yo when somebody scores in a World Cup match, so you can pay attention to your TV and see the replay. Or, you know, FIFA could send you a notification through their own app that lets you know who scored, what the score is, and even tap it to open a see the replay yourself.
Yo is dumb. It's a dumb concept, it's a dumb use scenario, it's a dumb app. That it's taken on this bizarre life of its own is utterly perplexing and flummoxing. For all the great things that our smartphones do, there's so much stupid shit like this that just, I, I don't know what to say.
Yo is a cry for attention. Not from the user, and not from the developer. It's a a howl in the darkness, begging for somebody, anybody, to rescue us from this insanity.
But, should you really want to get Yo for yourself and see just what this nonsense is about, it's available for free from Google Play.
Yo.
