pairing & sync
The phone finds your desktop on the wifi, your desktop says Allow once, and recordings flow on their own.
pairing
Pairing happens once, and the phone does the finding. No QR codes, no six-digit codes to type.
Open yapyap on your computer.
On the phone: settings → Desktop → search for desktops (or the pairing step during setup). Desktops on the same wifi show up as tappable rows.
Tap pair. The phone shows "waiting for your desktop to allow…".
Consent lives on the desktop: a request pops up there with Allow / Reject. Nobody can pair a phone to your desktop without physically clicking Allow on it.
If it doesn't work, the message tells you which side to look at: "no desktop found — is yapyap open on your computer?" means discovery failed (check wifi, check the desktop app is running); "the desktop declined" means someone hit Reject — allow the request there and retry. You can revoke a pairing any time with remove on the desktop card.
what syncs, and when
Each recording travels as a package: the audio, its title, and your markers — straight from phone to desktop over your local network. Nothing is relayed through any server.
Auto-sync is on by default. Whenever the desktop is reachable, pending recordings push themselves: right after you stop recording, when you open the app, and on a gentle background retry. You'll rarely press anything.
Two switches in settings → Recordings control the behaviour:
| setting | on (default) | off |
|---|---|---|
| auto-sync to desktop | recordings sync whenever the desktop is reachable | you sync manually from the sync sheet |
| delete after syncing | the phone copy is removed once the desktop confirms it has the file | recordings stay on the phone, marked with a green check |
Worth knowing: with the defaults, a synced recording disappears from the phone — the desktop is its home. Flip delete after syncing off if you want the phone to keep its own copy.
reading the sync states
The cloud icon on the home screen (and the banner in your recordings list) tells you where things stand:
- all recordings synced — green check, nothing pending.
- N recordings to sync — pending, will go automatically.
- desktop offline — N recordings waiting — the desktop couldn't be reached. Recordings are safe on the phone and go over the moment your desktop is awake and on the same wifi.
- pair a desktop to sync recordings — not paired yet.
Failures are never silent and never destructive: a failed sync leaves the recording on the phone with a retry at hand, and the sync sheet offers retry failed for anything that got stuck.
running yapyap on your own server
A device that never sleeps changes what sync feels like. Your library is already there when you open a laptop, and your phone hands over a 3am recording without a laptop of yours being awake for it. The server is an ordinary device on your list: it holds the whole library, keeps it in step, and takes one of your license slots, so one key covers two laptops and a server.
docker-compose.yap-server.yml in the repository starts it, and the file's
own header walks through the two cases. On one network, run the peer
container alone and your devices find it by themselves. For phones on
cellular, start the relay container too, put it behind your own hostname,
and set that address on every device. The first boot prints a paste string
and a console token to the container log, and the page that admits a new
device asks for the token, so read both with
docker compose -f docker-compose.yap-server.yml logs peer. Give the
server its own license key: checking it is the one call the container makes
to anywhere.