Philosophy
Our approach
Four principles guide the design decisions. They are not decoration: each one has already caused a feature to be rejected that would have been easy to write.
Everything stays in your home
The app speaks directly to your devices, on your own local network. No account to create, no cloud service in the middle, no tracking, no usage statistics. Nothing about your setup leaves your home — not the names of your rooms, not what you are listening to. This is not a setting you could switch on: it is how the product is built.
The device decides what it can do
Two receivers from the same brand do not offer the same functions. Rather than one identical interface everywhere, YODiM asks each device what it can do and shows only that. A missing function does not appear; a function that exists but is unavailable is greyed out, so you know it is there. You never press a button that will do nothing.
Nothing starts on its own
No zone turns on without a gesture from you. When a group forms, only the zones already on are involved. A room can be locked: YODiM will then refuse to send sound there — from a button, from a preset, or from the master volume. For a baby’s room, a study, a terrace at night.
Measure before you claim
Devices do not always behave the way their documentation claims. Every function in YODiM was therefore bench-tested against real hardware — several models, from different generations — before it was written. When a measurement contradicts an assumption, the assumption goes. Several features were dropped for exactly that reason.
What this means in practice
One example. When several rooms play the same music, a slight offset is enough to produce an echo from room to room. The cause is not the network: it is the time each receiver takes to process the sound.
YODiM reduces that processing to a minimum on every member of the group, then restores it afterwards. This behaviour was not deduced from a manual: it comes from measurements taken on powered devices, in a real house.
Accessibility and languages
The app is available in 12 languages, including Arabic, which reads right to left — the layout mirrors accordingly. Text follows the font size chosen in the phone’s settings, and dashboards rearrange themselves to the screen, from phone to tablet.