YUGO

Telenet YUGO is a streaming TV app from Telenet, the Belgian telecom operator. Following the success of its predecessor Yelo Play, Telenet set out to build a modern app that lets customers watch whatever they want, whenever and wherever — moving entertainment off the set-top box and onto the screens people already carry. icapps, working alongside Telenet's design and backend teams, built the full native front-end across mobile and TV.

Watch what you want, wherever you are

YUGO turns any Apple device into a TV. Instead of being tied to a set-top box, customers can stream live and on-demand content on their iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, and pick up where they left off across them. The pitch at launch said it plainly: goodbye digibox, hello YUGO.

One experience, built to scale

The app was built natively for each platform — iOS and iPadOS first, with the Apple TV (tvOS) version following a few months later — and it sits on a deliberately dynamic, configurable front-end structure. That architecture lets Telenet shape and grow the app over time, and was designed from the start as a foundation that future Telenet apps could be built on, not just a single product.

The challenge

A streaming app has to feel native on screens that work nothing alike. On iPhone and iPad it's touch; on Apple TV it's the remote and the focus engine — and the navigation, layout and interactions have to feel right on each while sharing as much logic as possible underneath. Video playback, live and on-demand, has to be smooth and reliable, and the whole thing has to perform well on Apple TV hardware and across a wide range of devices. On top of that, the dynamic front-end structure had to be flexible enough for Telenet to reconfigure and extend the app without a native release each time, and robust enough to carry products beyond YUGO. And because icapps worked embedded with Telenet's in-house design and backend teams, the technical work had to stay tightly in sync across companies.

My role

I was the Technical iOS Lead on YUGO at icapps, responsible for the Apple-platform side of the project — the native iOS, iPadOS and tvOS apps.

Outcome

YUGO launched in 2019 as Telenet's modern streaming experience across iPhone, iPad and Apple TV (alongside Android), giving customers a way to watch on their own devices instead of the set-top box. Built on a scalable, dynamic foundation, it became a platform Telenet could keep building on — and another successful chapter in icapps' long-running partnership with Telenet.