Why Yana is changing

Where this started

I started building Yana in 2016. I was 22, I had been battling depression for 14 years, and what I wanted was something that would help me through the dark times. During one particular depressive episode, I desperately looked for help in the only thing within reach: my phone. There were about six apps in the App Store associated with the word “depression.” I downloaded all of them, only to realize none had a Spanish version, and none of them were useful to me. They were either tests to see if you had depression symptoms, or long pieces of text that had no business being an app instead of a Wikipedia page.

One of my best friends at the time dragged me to therapy, and I was lucky enough to find a therapist who was both a great fit for me and had the therapeutic approach I needed then. She gave me a list of things to practice between sessions: small activities, things to notice, things to report and then talk about the next week. I got home and immediately lost the piece of paper. I forgot about the activities, never did them, and came back the next week having forgotten the whole thing.

That experience inspired the very first version of Yana: an app that would give you a list of activities depending on how you were doing, remind you to do them, and help you keep track of how they made you feel. I’d been teaching myself to code for almost two years, so I assumed building it myself would be easy. Nobody needed to know. It would be my little secret project.

The truth is, I was deeply ashamed of sharing this with anyone. At the time, mental health carried a lot more stigma, at least where I grew up. Going to therapy could still mean being called “crazy,” so beyond the few people closest to me, I never imagined talking about it openly. And since nobody talked about it, I assumed I was the only one who felt this way. I thought I was utterly and completely alone. So why share it at all, if no one else would need something like this, and all I’d get was the shame of having shared it? Nope. I needed to stay quiet.

Oh, how wrong I was.

I ended up telling one person about the project, and they said: “I’ve been through some hard times myself, so I know what you mean.” Then I told another, and another, and slowly realized I wasn’t alone at all. Worse, it made me see how many of us had been battling something in silence. So I decided to do it “for real,” whatever that meant at the time. I can’t share the whole story here; it would become a book instead of a blog post. But the idea kept taking shape until I understood it had to be a chatbot.

Mind you, chatbots back then were nothing like the AI you know today. But I knew it had to be a conversation, even with the technology we had. I had no idea how I was going to pull it off, but I was sure that was the way.

When I pitched it in public, people laughed openly: “No one will ever want to talk to a robot about their feelings, especially at their worst.” Others came up to me privately afterward and said, “I think I’d actually use something like this,” or “Not me, but my sister went through something like that, and this would have helped her so much.” (Sometimes it was a partner, a best friend, a cousin. I heard every version.)

I launched a crowdfunding campaign to officially get it started. The goal was to reach 16,000 people. Ten years later, Yana has been downloaded more than 18 million times, and a thousand lessons came along the way.

This post is about the biggest one.

What we kept seeing

Most people came to Yana when something was already hurting. They talked, felt a little better, and left until the next hard moment, months or sometimes years later. In fact, many of the people downloading Yana weren’t new at all. They’d had it before, deleted it, and were installing it again because things had gotten hard again. And again. And again.

For a long time, I thought that was fine. Yana was there when it mattered. It was being, for other people, exactly what I’d wished I had on my worst days. But the longer I watched it, the more it looked like an emergency room. You go when something is wrong. You get help with what’s hurting right now. But nothing about the visit necessarily changes what happens between one emergency and the next.

Emotional wellbeing doesn’t really work that way. The strength you have on a hard day mostly comes from what you built on the ordinary ones: noticing how you feel before it overwhelms you, practicing small things that are good for you, like gratitude or affirmations, learning to talk to yourself more kindly, and getting to know yourself a little better each week. That’s the part Yana wasn’t helping with.

We tried. For years, we added social features, smart reminders, personalized programs, mood insights, exercises, and all kinds of things that might turn “I’ll take care of myself when I’m in pain” into “I’ll take care of myself a little every day.” None of it solved the underlying problem. At its core, Yana was (mostly) a conversational experience, and people open a conversation when they have something to say. For most of us, that’s when something hurts.

At some point, I had to admit there were only two honest paths left. One was to lean fully into what Yana had become: crisis support, connecting people with therapists, building everything around the hardest moments. I’ll never know if that would have worked, because we never pursued it. It wasn’t what I wanted to build. The mission has always been the same; it’s literally in the name. Yana: You Are Not Alone. And being there for you can’t only mean being there at your worst.

The other path was to stop. And for a while, I honestly thought that’s where we were headed.

But I realized I didn’t want to close the door on the mission. I wanted to close the door on the version of Yana that wasn’t serving it. So we gave it one more shot, built the way I’d build it if I were starting today.

That’s the new Yana.

So we started over

The idea behind it is simple: taking a few minutes a day to check in with yourself, and do a few small things for your own growth, can be something you actually enjoy.

That’s why it’s a cozy game now. It started with a question: what if your inner world, the one you carry around every day but never get to see, was something you could actually look at and take care of?

So in the new Yana, you’ll have a little world of your own. When you tell Yana how you’re feeling, the world will respond: the sky will change, it might rain, a rainbow might show up. Every kind of weather will belong there, rain included. You’ll do small self-care activities picked for that moment, and your world will grow. And whenever you want to talk, Yana will be right there, like always.

I know how “game” can sound next to “mental health.” Some of the first people to see the new version told us exactly that, and I understand the reaction. So let me explain why we chose this format:

Think about a gym. The music, the lighting, the equipment, even the atmosphere are part of the experience. But none of those things are the reason you go. You go because taking care of your body regularly matters.

That’s how we think about the new Yana. The world, the activities, the things you unlock, the little moments of play are there to make taking care of yourself something you actually want to come back to. The point isn’t the game itself. It’s making it easier to build small habits that support you.

The old Yana became an emergency room. The new Yana is meant to be more like the gym: a place you visit on normal days, so you’re not starting from zero when the hard ones come.

Yana and the hard moments

This change also made us think carefully about something else: what role Yana should play when someone comes to her with something difficult.

Yana is not, and has never been, a therapist. We’ve made our best effort to communicate that over the years, but we’ve also learned that sometimes people still experienced or interpreted Yana as one. And frankly, I don’t blame them. When you can have a conversation with Yana that feels personal, thoughtful and caring, the line between a supportive companion and a therapist can become difficult to see.

But the therapeutic process is fundamentally different, and we don’t believe AI can replace it, especially when someone is going through an acute or serious mental health crisis.

We also know that not everyone who turns to Yana instead of therapy is making that choice because they prefer AI. Therapy can be expensive, inaccessible, or simply unavailable. Sometimes people are using what they have because they need support. We don’t think AI has solved that problem.

That’s part of why we made a deliberate change to Yana herself. In the new version, she’ll be more careful about how she responds in difficult moments, and about not coming across as something she’s not. What doesn’t change is who she is: a supportive companion you’ll still be able to talk to about your life, your feelings, or whatever is on your mind.

You’ll still be able to come to her on a bad day. She’ll just be more careful not to use therapy language or give the impression that she can fulfill the role of a therapist.

And if you’re ever in a crisis, she’ll encourage you to reach out to a person, the same as she always has. You don’t have to wait for her to say it, though: most countries have free crisis lines, and you can find yours at findahelpline.com.

What I’m asking

If I can ask for one thing, and one thing only, it’s this: once it reaches you, try it. Give it a few days, not just a first glance. And then tell me honestly how it feels: what you love, what you don’t, what you miss from the last version. You can email us at [email protected], use this form, or write to us directly from the new app (the ⚙️ icon). I read everything people send. We’re a very small team, so when a message needs an answer, it can take us a little while to reply. But every single one gets read.

Please keep in mind that what you’ll see is a first version of what we want Yana to become. We could have spent years developing it before showing anyone, but we didn’t want to wait, and we didn’t want to build it alone. What comes next depends a lot on what you tell us.

I don’t expect everyone to love the new Yana. Some of you came for something specific, and I understand if this isn’t it. But I believe this is the version of Yana that can actually help people before the hard days, not only during them.

That’s what I set out to build ten years ago, with a lost piece of paper and a secret project.

It just took me this long to understand how.

A big hug,

Andrea