iOS app · 2026
Yomi
Looking after your plants, and watching them flourish.
Yomi follows each houseplant one by one: it recognises it from a photo, learns how often it gets thirsty in your home, and keeps track of what it becomes. Designed, drawn and built solo.
- Role
- Designer, engineer, owner
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- Ongoing
Context
Why Yomi exists
A houseplant rarely dies from being forgotten. Most often it dies from water at the wrong moment, and above all from too much of it. A reminder “every Sunday” doesn't know where the plant lives: the same plant can be thirsty every four days on a windowsill, or every twenty in a dark hallway.
Yomi starts there. It doesn't recite a calendar: it works out a rhythm for each plant, in its room, with its light and its pot, then refines it at every watering. And water is only a means. The point is to look after the plant, and to watch it grow.
Four means, and none of them is the point
- 01
Recognise
One photo, and the plant gets its name back.
- 02
Understand
Its light, its pot, its room, the season.
- 03
Water
At the right moment, learning from every watering.
- 04
Follow
Its journal, its photos, season after season.
How it works
From the shelf to the diagnosis
The path through the app, step by step: what Yomi knows about each plant, and what it does with it.
Library
All your plants, on one shelf
Every plant you add takes its place on a glass shelf. You add it by its name, or by a photo: artificial intelligence recognises it among sixty species. Its state shows at a glance: upright, it's fine; drooping, it's thirsty.
- 1Your city's weather, which tints the setting
- 2One sentence: what matters today
- 3The drop: this plant is thirsty
- 4Add a plant, by its name or a photo
Plant sheet
Every plant has its sheet, and its own advice
Two monsteras don't have the same needs. Yomi starts from the species profile, then takes into account what you tell it about your home: the size and material of the pot, the light, the room, the season. From that it works out a watering rhythm and advice for that plant in particular.
What Yomi knows
- Species
- Monstera deliciosa
- Room
- Living room
- Light
- Bright, no direct sun
- Pot
- Medium, terracotta
- Season
- September, full growth
What it works out
Watering · Every ~7 days, adjusted by each finger test
Fertiliser · At the next watering, diluted in the water, April to September
Orientation · A quarter turn of the pot at each watering, so it grows straight
Humidity · A mist on the leaves from November to March: heating dries the air
Warmth · Never below 15 °C
Winter · Rest from November to February: it drinks much less, the rhythm gets longer
Repotting · Every two years, in spring
A real example: the monstera's profile in the app's catalogue, for a living-room plant.
Notifications
Told on the right day, and only that day
Yomi works out in advance when each plant will be thirsty and groups those due the same day. On mornings when something is thirsty, a single notification, at the hour you choose, with the amount of water. On other days, nothing.
Tuesday, September 29
8:00
The pothos is thirsty.
now
A glass or two today, and it's set for ~8 days.
Watering can day.
Saturday
Pothos, Monstera and Calathea. Ten minutes, and everyone is fine.
Watering
Touch the soil before pouring
When it's time to water, one question: is the soil dry, still damp, soaked? The answer decides whether to pour, and adjusts that plant's rhythm. Yomi also says how much water, and how.
Diagnosis
A yellowing leaf? One photo, and the likely cause
This is where Yomi helps most. You describe what you see, or take a photo of the leaf: artificial intelligence spots the symptoms, then Yomi weighs them against the plant's situation (its light, its last watering, the season) to suggest the most likely cause and the first thing to do.
- Symptoms and causes come from the species profile: the AI cannot invent a disease.
- The photo is only sent when you ask.
Having a look…
The leaf, the soil, the light.
Left, the app's screen. Right, a reconstruction of the photo result, with the app's own wording.
In motion
The app, on film
Three moments recorded in the simulator, with no retouching of the interface.
Morning
The shelf settles, plant after plant.
The round
Tap the plant, it's watered.
Evening
The app turns dark with the phone.
The App Store listing
Six screens to say it all
The listing's visuals, one sentence per screen, in the app's voice.
The setting
A world of mist and glass
Every screen sits on a 3D-rendered setting: hills, a glass shelf, terracotta pots. The time of day and the city's weather pass lightly over it. In the evening the app follows the phone into dark mode, with a setting that has its own night.
60
species, each with its own profile
3
plants followed for free, for good
0
accounts to create
2
languages, French and English
Under the hood
How it's made
The app is SwiftUI, with iOS 26's Liquid Glass. The model (plants, species, reservoir, round planning) lives in a Swift package shared with the widget and locked down by tests.
Recognition and diagnosis go through a Cloudflare Worker that calls Claude. It can only answer with species and causes from the catalogue: the app shows its own sheets, never invented text.
The plants are generated renders, cut out by an in-house tool so no fringe survives. Weather comes from Open-Meteo and stays on the phone.
Stack
- SwiftUI
- WidgetKit
- StoreKit 2
- XCTest
- Cloudflare Workers
- Claude
- Gemini
- Open-Meteo
Current state
Where the project stands
Yomi is in French and English. Free with three plants; Yomi Plus adds unlimited plants, photo recognition and diagnosis, monthly, yearly or once and for all.