Is ‘Yo’ The Stupidest App Ever?
Still better than Flappy Bird, though.
If you struggle at typing a two-letter word and hitting send, there’s now an app that does all that hard work for you. It’s called ‘Yo’ and it’s capabilities pretty much begin and end there: choose a contact, hit send, and the app will send the word ‘Yo’ — or ‘Yoyo’ if you’re feeling generous — along with a pre-recorded message. Saying, “Yo!”
Sound stupid? Some people don’t think so; Mashable reports the app has broken into the Apple App Store’s top 150 free apps in the U.S and is now sitting at number 47 (above Slingshot, Facebook’s attempt at Snapchat). Creator and CEO Or Arbel told Mashable that the total number of downloads has now exceeded 160, 000. And 50, 000 users have already sent over 4 million Yos.
Yo launched fairly quietly back in April (on April Fool’s Day to be more accurate, so you wouldn’t have been alone in thinking the whole thing was a massive prank). But it wasn’t until this week when the Financial Times posted an article about Yo that downloads began to soar. And the app already has over $1 million in investments.
While Think Progress questioned the sustainability of the app, Arbel told the New York Times: “People think it’s just an app that says ‘Yo.’ But it’s really not. We like to call it context-based messaging. You understand by the context what is being said.”
Surely we haven’t come so far that we need (or want) an app to automate a two-word greeting – along with obviously necessary audio. But then again, this:
Making fun of an app called Yo in 140 characters or less is a nice way to tell the world you lack the cognitive comprehension of irony.
— ☁️David Ulevitch☁️ (@davidu) June 19, 2014