Why I built this
I wanted a reading app that did not feel like a slot machine.
Every oracle app I tried was built around return visits and notifications, and none of them quite met me where I needed the book to meet me. The I Ching is not a notification. It is a mirror you pick up, slowly, when something in you needs to be shown back to you. You do not need a streak counter for that. You need one clear page, written carefully, and then space to contemplate.
HexWave is the app I wanted. A Birth Hexagram Triad you receive once and keep for life. A daily hexagram drawn from the same ancient cycle as everyone else's, so there is no personalised prediction to rig. A small circle of people whose triads sit beside yours, because the I Ching has always been as much about relationship as self.
I am Asaf, the person behind HexWave.
HexWave is the meeting point of two long lines in my life: fifteen years as a software engineer, and a lifetime of spiritual practice. This is what they made when they finally sat down together.
I studied the I Ching for years before meeting my partner, Zoe, only to discover she had been doing exactly the same. That unexpected connection, and the love story that followed, is what finally brought this application to life. While I write the code, together we shape the design, the vision, and the soul of the experience. We decided it was time to share this light with the world. Our bar for your reading remains strict: it must be poetic, accurate, and completely yours to keep.
People often assume ancient systems are vague and mystical, but the truth is they are ruthlessly specific. When you strip away the modern generalizations, you are left with a precise structure that is deeply startling to read.Asaf and Zoe, on the HexWave vision
It is not trying to be a community. It is not trying to be a brand. It is trying to be a good edition of a very old book, on your phone.
About the I Ching
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is a Chinese divinatory and philosophical text assembled across roughly three thousand years. It is one of the oldest continuously-read books in the world. Confucius is said to have worn out the leather bindings of his copy three times. Jung wrote the foreword to the Wilhelm translation. Leibniz saw binary numbers in its structure.
The text is organised around sixty-four hexagrams, each a stack of six lines. Each line is either yang (unbroken) or yin (broken). Sixty-four images, six lines each, three thousand years of commentary. That is the book.
If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi [I Ching], and then I might come to be without great faults.Confucius, Analects 7:17 (attributed; James Legge translation)
HexWave does not replace reading the book. It gives you a way in that is calibrated to you, and a small set of tools for daily use. If you fall in love with the text, three editions are worth living with: Wilhelm/Baynes (Princeton, 1950) for the canonical scholarly translation, Alfred Huang's The Complete I Ching (Inner Traditions, 1998) for a Daoist-lineage reading from inside the tradition, and Bradford Hatcher's The Book of Changes - Word by Word (open-access, 2009) for the line-by-line philological breakdown. That is the proper ending.
Mutual Maps
The I Ching has always been as much about relationship as self. HexWave honours that with Mutual Maps, a quiet way to hold two birth triads beside each other and read what passes between them.
Add the people who matter, friend or partner, and their three hexagrams sit beside yours, line by line, in the same lens whether the bond is romantic or platonic. You see where you resonate at the foundation, where one of you is the other's growth edge, and what you share with everyone else carrying the same patterns. It is not a compatibility score and not a prediction; it is the structure underneath a relationship, in the language the book has used for three thousand years. As far as I have looked, no other app reads relationships this way.
Principles
The ones I will not cross, written down so you can hold me to them.
Calm by design.
No streaks. No push. No gamification of an oracle. The Humane by Design rubric is the rulebook.
No dark patterns.
No fake urgency. No hidden charges. No "7 people just signed up near you" nonsense. Cancellation is two taps.
Data privacy as a default.
Your birth data is encrypted at rest and used only to cast your hexagrams. It is not sold, syndicated, or fed to ad networks.
Independent.
No investors, no growth targets, no pivot risk. HexWave is small on purpose.
A book, not a platform.
The goal is to make the I Ching feel held in the hand. Every design decision is graded against that.
Colophon
Typeset in Noto Serif and Inter. Palette is parchment, ink, and antique gold, with five muted element colours from the Chinese wuxing. Powered by a calculation engine built from the ground up: precise math for the plum-blossom method, the sixty-day Gan Zhi cycle, and the full King Wen sequence, resolved to the line with no rounding and no approximation.
Questions, corrections, hardship rate requests: get in touch.