Two hands holding a phone with a dark, switched off screen on a wet residential street of brick terraced houses.

London · Consumer software

We make small mobile apps for everyday life.

A London studio with its own name on the work: single purpose apps for iPhone and Android that open, do the one thing, and get out of the way.

Most people’s phones are full of software they tolerate. We are interested in the small number of apps they would miss.

What we build

Three commitments that describe the work.

Everyday tools

One thing, done properly

Single purpose applications that do one thing without an account, a subscription wall on first open, or a feed. If an app can work before you sign in, it will.

Considered interfaces

Drawn and built together

Design and engineering are done by the same small team, so the thing that ships is the thing that was drawn. There is no handover in which the intent gets lost.

Plainly described

Plain about what it does not do

Each app carries a plain description of what it does, what it deliberately leaves out, and what data it holds on the device and off it. The absences are stated as clearly as the features.

Loose sheets of paper marked with pencil rectangles, a wooden pencil and a steel ruler on a pale oak desk in window light.

Approach

We start on paper, and we stay small on purpose.

An idea earns a build when it can be written down in one sentence that a person outside the company would understand. Anything that needs a paragraph of setup goes back.

From there the work runs in short passes: draw it, build the smallest version that can be held in a hand, use it for a week of ordinary days, then decide. Small keeps the loop honest. A team that can rebuild a screen in an afternoon does not have to defend a bad one.

Principles

Five rules the work runs on.

We ship small.

A release is allowed to be narrow. It is not allowed to be vague about what it is.
We would rather cut a feature than ship it half built.

A missing feature is a decision a person can plan around. A broken one is a small betrayal.
We do not sell attention.

Our apps carry no advertising, and there are no engagement mechanics whose purpose is to keep a phone in a hand longer than the task requires.
We treat a phone as a personal object.

Data stays on the device unless sending it somewhere is the whole point of the feature. Where it does travel, the screen that sends it says so, and not only the policy page.
We answer our own mail.

One address reaches the people writing the code, and the reply comes back from the same person, usually inside a working day.

How work is decided

Three questions, asked before anything is built.

Does the app do something a person already does, only with less friction? Can it work with no account and no network for its core job? Would we keep it on our own phones after the novelty of making it has gone?

An idea that fails the third question is abandoned rather than parked in a list where it can quietly gather weight. Abandoning is part of the method, not a failure of it.

A kitchen table in a small flat with a phone lying face up, screen off, a glass of water and a hard rectangle of low winter sunlight across the wood.

Where the work is aimed

Ordinary minutes, on ordinary phones.

The inside of a London bus on a grey afternoon, a hand on the rail and rain running down the window. — The four minutes on a bus, when an app has to be usable with one thumb and no attention to spare.

Close detail of a thumb resting on the edge of a phone with a dark screen, held against a wool coat. — A phone is held, not operated. We design for the hand that is already holding it.

A tiled front doorstep of a British terraced house with a painted door, a doormat and a bicycle wheel at the edge of the frame. — The moment on a doorstep when something needs to be checked in five seconds and then put away.

The register

Everything here is checkable in about thirty seconds.

Companies House registration details for YYY Software Ltd
Legal name	YYY SOFTWARE LTD
Company number	16938311
Jurisdiction	England and Wales
SIC classification	62012

We publish our own registry entry so that it can be checked rather than taken on trust. Search the company number at Companies House and you will find the same details filed there.

Tell us the daily task that annoys you.

The work starts from small, repeated irritations: the thing you do most days that takes four taps more than it should. Two sentences is plenty, and it is a genuinely useful message to receive.

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