FAQ - SwitcherYu

This FAQ provides general information about SwitcherYu (net.theprimemachine.switcheryu).

SwitcherYu is a privacy-conscious, multilingual conversation app designed around a local-first model. It is intended to help people read and contribute to a shared conversation across a small fixed set of languages, with each language presented as its own view onto the same conversation and up to four languages instantly accessible from their own tabs.

SwitcherYu may be useful for:

Some people may find it a little like the old printed parallel-language format, where one page showed one language and the facing page showed another. SwitcherYu is not literally a book-like layout, but it is built around the same broad idea that one shared piece of content can be viewed through different language lenses.

In general, you do not. SwitcherYu is not designed around sender identity. It does not aim to present a sender-centric chat experience with visible authorship markers, avatars, profiles, read receipts, or typing indicators.

The app is designed to keep the focus on the language content in one shared thread, not on building a social or identity layer around each message.

No. SwitcherYu does not use The Prime Machine Server for storing or processing SwitcherYu conversations.

The app is designed as a local-first app. Conversations are ordinarily stored on your device, and optional nearby hosted sessions are shared locally between participating devices rather than being routed through a SwitcherYu cloud service.

SwitcherYu is designed to be primarily offline-first and local-first.

However, some Apple language features may require system-managed language downloads, and Apple’s translation support may in some cases request internet access in order to enable or support translation capability on the device. That behavior relates to Apple’s platform services rather than a SwitcherYu cloud backend.

SwitcherYu is designed with privacy and simplicity in mind. It does not depend on a general cloud backend or internet-hosted chat model, and it does not send your conversations to a remote AI service operated by The Prime Machine.

The app is intentionally lightweight and relies on language and translation capabilities made available on the device through Apple’s platform. This means there are limits compared with server-based systems, but it also helps keep the app local-first and privacy-conscious.

Language support depends on the language and translation capabilities made available to developers by Apple at the time the current version of the app was developed.

As Apple expands, changes, or refines language support in its frameworks, SwitcherYu’s language availability may also change in future versions.

You may need to download the relevant translation language support provided by Apple for your device.

Translation availability can depend on your version of iOS, your device, the languages involved, and whether the necessary language resources have been made available on your system. If translation support is missing, incomplete, or unavailable, the app may show source-language text instead.

Translation quality can vary. SwitcherYu relies on Apple’s translation capabilities where available, and there is no guarantee that translations will always be complete, exact, or appropriate for every context.

Users should check important meanings carefully and should not rely on the app for situations requiring guaranteed precision.

Short responses are particularly prone to being translated incorrectly because they often lack context. For example, the English word “Good” may be interpreted in the sense of benefit, value, or quality, rather than as a brief reply to a question such as “How is it?”.

Romanisation support depends on what Apple’s APIs provide for the relevant language. For languages such as Simplified Chinese, the romanised output relies entirely on Apple’s API behavior.

Accordingly, there is no guarantee that the output will correspond exactly to an official scheme such as pinyin in every case. If you are trying to learn or use an official system for representing a language in Roman letters, you are encouraged to verify the output carefully rather than relying on the app alone.

Translation support may vary by device depending on operating system version, installed language resources, and Apple-provided language availability. In a hosted nearby session, one participant’s device may be able to assist with a translation that another device cannot currently perform locally.

When you join a hosted session, one nearby device acts as the host for the shared conversation. The host controls the authoritative conversation state for that session.

Messages submitted into the session are shared with the host, and the host may then share the resulting conversation state locally with the other participants in that session.

Yes. If you participate in a hosted session, other participants may be able to read, copy, export, screenshot, remember, or otherwise retain text that appears on their device.

For that reason, you should avoid using hosted sessions for confidential, sensitive, or highly private information unless you fully trust the participants.

In some hosted sessions, the host may request translation assistance from participant devices. If your device is asked to help, your device may receive text from the shared conversation for translation processing and may return a candidate translation result to the host.

That is part of how the hosted conversation may be completed across languages when translation capability is uneven between devices.

Not necessarily.

Within the hosted conversation state, the host can make authoritative deletions or corrections. However, if another participant has already seen, copied, exported, noted down, or captured the text in some other way, deletion in the app cannot guarantee that all such copies disappear.

SwitcherYu is not designed to expose translator identity to users. If another participant device helps provide a translation in a hosted session, that remains an internal part of the session flow rather than a user-facing identity feature.

Depending on your version of iOS and your device settings, you may be able to adjust privacy or paste-related system settings so that the app can paste from the clipboard with fewer prompts. The exact options depend on Apple’s operating system behavior.

The autosend feature is a composition convenience intended for the local user or the host while drafting text.

It can help when someone is speaking or typing in short sentence-like units. As completed leading text becomes ready, the app can send that portion into the message thread while leaving any unfinished remainder in the editor. This can make it easier to dictate or type progressively without having to manually send each completed sentence separately.

The hosted expanded editor and its autosend behavior are intended as a local composition aid for the person using that composing device, especially the host/local side. It is not a separate message model and does not change the host-authoritative structure of the conversation.

Yes. SwitcherYu supports user-initiated sharing through the standard system share sheet. Depending on how you use it, you may be able to share a current language view, a multilingual export, or a multilingual export including available romanisation.

As with any sharing feature, once you choose to send content out of the app, that content may then be handled by the destination you selected.

No. SwitcherYu is not presented as a secure-messaging service, and it is not designed as a confidential communications platform.

It is a privacy-conscious, local-first multilingual conversation app, but shared-session use still involves trust in the participating devices and people.

No. You should not rely on the app for confidential, medical, legal, financial, or other highly sensitive communication, and you should not rely on its translations or romanisation where guaranteed accuracy is required.

SwitcherYu is intentionally designed to be lightweight, local-first, multilingual, and relatively simple. It focuses on a shared thread viewed through different languages, rather than on accounts, cloud sync, social identity, or a generic chat-platform model.

That design brings privacy and simplicity benefits, but it also means the app has deliberate limits.