recording on the go

recording

The home screen is one big record button. Tap it and the timer starts — the header and buttons slide away so nothing competes with the recording. Tap again to stop: DONE, saved. That's the whole flow.

A few behaviours worth knowing:

• Pausing is automatic when a call, Siri or an alarm interrupts — and recording resumes by itself afterwards.
• Recordings shorter than a second are discarded — an accidental tap doesn't create clutter.
• Storage is guarded. When your phone drops under ~100 MB free you get a warning; under ~10 MB yapyap stops the recording and still saves everything captured so far. A full disk never eats your audio.
• If saving fails the button turns into RETRY — the audio is still in hand, nothing is lost.

mark the good moments

While recording, a mark moment pill sits under the timer. Tap it when someone says the thing — each tap drops a time-stamped marker (with a little haptic nudge). Markers become pins on your desktop: after sync they show up on the recording's timeline, ready to be labelled there. On the phone you just tap; naming comes later, on a real keyboard.

start recording from anywhere

You don't have to open the app first — yapyap can start a recording from wherever your thumb already is:

• Control Center (iOS 18) — open Control Center, long-press → Add a Control, and pick start recording under yapyap go. One tap records in the background — the app never opens. A Live Activity appears on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island with a timer, a mark button (same pins as the in-app "mark moment" pill), and a stop button. The finished recording lands in your recordings list like any other — playable on the phone and ready to sync.
• Lock Screen (iOS 18) — long-press your Lock Screen → Customise, tap either bottom button, and swap it for yapyap's start recording control. Same background behaviour.
• Action Button (iPhone 15 Pro and later) — in Settings → Action Button, choose Controls and pick start recording. Same background behaviour.
• Shortcuts & Siri (iOS) — the Start recording action appears in the Shortcuts app, so you can put it in a shortcut, run it with "Hey Siri", or chain it into automations — it too records without opening the app.
• Long-press the app icon — press and hold the yapyap icon on your home screen and tap start recording. On iOS 18 this starts the same background recording (the app opens on top, showing the running timer); on Android it opens the app straight into the focused recording view.
• Quick Settings tile (Android) — swipe down twice, tap the pencil/edit button, and drag yapyap's record tile into your active tiles. Tapping it opens the app straight into recording. (Android needs the app in the foreground to use the mic, so unlike the iOS control the app does come to the front.)
• Anything that can open a link — the URL yapyap://?action=record opens the app recording too. Handy for Android widget/automation apps (Tasker, macrodroid, a home-screen link widget) or older iPhones: make a Shortcut with Open URLs pointing at that address.

If you open yapyap while a background recording is running, the home screen shows its timer — mark moments or tap the big button to stop, exactly as if you'd started it there. And it works the other way round too: a recording started from the app puts the same Live Activity on your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, so you can switch to other apps and still see the timer, mark moments, and stop from anywhere.

One thing to know about background quick-recordings: allow the microphone in yapyap first (the onboarding asks), and don't force-quit yapyap mid-recording — stop from the Live Activity (or the app's home screen) and the file is safe.

recording with the screen off

Recording keeps running when you switch apps or lock the screen.

• iOS: works out of the box via the background audio session.
• Android: works via an ongoing notification (Android requires a visible notification for background microphone use). If you denied notification permission, recording still works — but only while the app is on screen.

your recordings

The recordings screen groups everything by time — today, yesterday, earlier this week, and so on. Each row shows the title, duration, marker count, and its sync state at the right edge: a sending pill while transferring, a green check once it's on your desktop, or a small cloud for phone-only recordings.

Tap a row for its options:

• edit title — rename right on the phone; the title syncs with the audio.
• play — opens the full-screen player with a real waveform (marker positions tinted in rust), a scrubber, and rename/sync/delete at hand.
• sync now — push this one recording immediately.
• delete — removes it from the phone, permanently, after a confirmation.

importing audio from other apps

Two ways to get existing audio into yapyap:

1. share to yapyap — in Voice Memos (or any app), hit share and pick yapyap. On iOS the share sheet takes one file at a time; Android handles multi-file shares.
2. import audio file — the button on the home screen opens the system picker, multi-select allowed.

Imported files land in your recordings list in the normal timeline, named after the file, and play right on the phone. They forward to the desktop like any recording, where the audio is decoded and transcribed. Most common formats are accepted: m4a, mp3, wav, aac, flac, ogg, opus, caf, aiff, wma.