Our designer, Katrina, entered a photo contest on Gizmodo’s site to create a fake iPhone 4.0 interface and got 2nd place! She, of course, remembered to do a bit of product placement for zing! Free.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5457441/26-interesting-but-fake-interfaces-for-iphone-40?skyline=true&s=i
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To expand the zing! user base, we've developed zing! free! Who doesn’t like free stuff? We submitted the app during the last week of December, which coincided with Apple’s company shutdown. So, zing! free wouldn't be reviewed until the 4th. It so happens that they got to our app very quickly and rejected it that same day (the bright side is that the process is getting faster).For zing! free, we adjusted the layout to accommodate ads and an upgrade button. The buttons are smaller, and arranged into 2 rows of 3 instead of 3 rows of 2. In addition to adjusting the layout, we only used 1 combat sound per theme (instead of 3 in the paid version). To entice upgrades, we provided previews of 'bow chicka bow wow' and the shock. Those buttons are “greyed” out and only playable once per session. Once users press the button, a popup appears and lets them know that this sound can be used more if they upgraded.This is the email we received:
Zing! FREE cannot be posted because it is a beta or feature-limited version. Free or "Lite" versions are acceptable, however the application must be a fully functional app and cannot reference features that are not implemented or up-sell to the full version.Luckily we got rejected because realized that there was a typo on our pop up screen (see the second screenshot). Since receiving that email, we altered our app and resubmitted it on 1/12/10. We now allow users to use the sounds without any restrictions. And as a result, our app is now in the app store as of 1/15/10! Apple's approval process is finally getting faster.
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Our good name is being spread around the web. Hooray! This time, it's on Appboy, for the daily featured developers list, as announced on Appboy's Twitter page.
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Zing! Free is out for download at the iTunes app store. What's different?1. The app is ad supported through Admob
2. Smaller buttons with a different layout (to support ads)
3. Only one combat sound for each screen (as opposed to the 3 per screen
when you shake it)
4. It's FREE!
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To make it easier for people to find zing!, we decided to post some keywords to help them out. Since our most unique sound (bow chicka bow wow), could be spelled many different ways, we turned to Urban Dictionary to find out how many other ways one could spell it. There are 15 ways, or 14 ways too many.
Bow Chicka Bow Bow
Bow Chicka Bow Wow
Bow Chicka Wow Wow
Bow Chicka Wah Wah
Bow Chicka Wah Wow
Bom Chicka Wah Wah
Bom Chika Wah Wah
Bow Chica Bow Bow
Bow Chica Wow Wow
Bow Chica Wah Wah
Bow Chick A Bow Wow
Bow Chick Bow Wow
Bow Chika Bow Bow
Bow Chika Bow Wow
Bow Chika Wow Wow
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AppAdvice gave us 15 clicks of fame as their Featured App of the Day on the AppAdvice Daily podcast. You can skip to 3:36 to hear the blurb about zing!.
Our favorite quotes:"I love the UI!"“I like this application because it’s easy to use and doesn’t have tons unnecessary sounds. It only has the ones that you’ll need for time appropriate situations.”Comments [0]
As everyone knows by now, iPhone app approval is a fickle beast. While Apple's recently made efforts to improve transparency, and the numbers look promising on their face - 95% of all apps submitted eventually get approved! - there's still pitfall after pitfall in the way of getting an app into iPhone user hands. We learned this firsthand through our submission, rejection, re-submission, re-rejection, re-re-submission, re-re-rejection, re-re-re-submission, and final, glorious approval (phew!) of our inaugural app - zing!. When we built zing!, we thought we were clever. We thought hard about each screen, button, interaction and sound that went into our first foray into iPhone apps. We didn't expect our cleverness to bite us in the ass. Lesson learned: don't try to be cute with the iPhone app gods. They are not amused.
In our initial zing! submission, on the Default screen, we used Dick Cheney's face, thinking he was the apotheosis of all that's sinister and the perfect representation to trigger our Evil Laugh effect.
8 days after submission, Apple emailed us with a screen shot of Darth Cheney informing us they rejected our app because it ridicules a public figure. Guess you can't get anything past them, nosirreebob.
So we happily changed the icon to the Evil Clown. (psst, that's our beautiful designer hiding underneath that photoshop job. Thankfully, she's not Vice President... yet.) Round two: we received a call from an App Store (app)rover - a nice touch to keep our hopes up, even though the gist of the call was that they found two more reasons to keep us out of the App Store. And by "more" I mean "silly." zing! is a soundbox app. You push a button and a sound effect plays. Keychains sold in Claire's and prizes in claw-grabber arcade games do the same thing. So we figured, 4+ crowd, no problem. Apple had a different idea - suggesting to us that the sound of creaky bedsprings (zing! Human theme screen, pr0n button) was too racy for the ears of the littl'uns, and suggested we try for 17+. I guess you can never be too careful of lascivious sound effects... We overshot the mark though, because in a later update, we lowered the age requirement to 12+, and it sailed right on through to re-approval. Our jokester nature got us reason number 3 we weren't getting any play in the App Store. For the Fail effect on the Robot screen we originally created an iPhone Blue S creen of Death with a sound that emulated the Windows BSOD failure we all know and love.
But the joke was on us, actually. Protip: No app may suggest failure of the iPhone hardware (see: the app that took a screen shot of the home screen and displayed cracks). Apple thinks this might confuse iPhone users less savvy than you and I. Ok, fine. Take out humor, insert Epic Fail, re-re-submit.
But who had the Epic Fail IRL? That's right, we did - rejected once again, even though we'd cleared our idea with the nice Apple employee on the phone. Apparently, features acceptable to one approver may not be acceptable to another. The Epic Fail wasn't clear enough of a joke to some higher power, and we had to completely change our Robot Fail effect to the familiar sounding, but having nothing to do with any recognizable classic sci-fi space opera for which we may be sued, robot-shot-by-a-laser sound that you enjoy today! After jumping through all those hoops, though, Apple finally gave us the thumbs up and we debuted our app to the world last month. Worth the wait? Sure. But hopefully our experience can help shed some light as you make your way down the dark and winding road that is the App Store approval process. In return, maybe you'd care to take a minute and 99 measly cents to check out what we've put together! In sum:
1. Don't ridicule public figures in any way - look at the Obama Hope app.
2. Do NOT suggest or imitate a hardware malfunction, because you KNOW how much Apple hates it when someone does something that can confuse their users (unless, of course, you're a celebrity).
3. Rate your app 17+ for anything remotely suggesting <whisper> S-E-X</whisper>.
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We've been pitching the zing! story to online and offline media - and it's bearing fruit.
Our first review came yesterday from Etch App Reviews. Choice quotes:
"the only down side of the app: I didn’t see my phone again for the next 30 minutes while everyone played with it."
"It's just FUN!; everyone needs laughter"
Another vector is Asian American press. Because we are Asian American owned, and worked with Goh Nakamura, a great Asian American independent guitarist, we received press in Asian Week, and Angry Asian Man.
We're working on coverage from more iPhone app reviews (their queues are long), the technology press, and men's sites/magazines and comedy type sites. In the next few weeks, we'll be writing about the app store process, and we have a great idea for a viral video. Ciao!
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We've submitted our first batch of updates to iTunes, so you'll see an update in a week or 2.
Notable changes
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