4th Time's a Charm - How We Got Through the iPhone App Store's Reject-o-matic

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.

zing! Phase 1 PR blitz

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!

zing! 1.1 Submitted For Approval

We've submitted our first batch of updates to iTunes, so you'll see an update in a week or 2.

Notable changes

• Sound Effect Update: Our analytics were telling us that Human Evil Laugh wasn't very popular, so just in time for Halloween, Dia De Las Muertes and anywhere in between, we’ve replaced it with a witch’s cackle.

• 17+ rating changed to 12+.  We initially set our app to 4+, but got rejected. 17+ has an annoying maturity warning, so we're hoping this gets through.

• Added Keywords: Should make it easier for people to find us on iTunes.

“Bow Chicka Bow Wow” Tops zing! Charts

It’s not surprising that the most played sound on zing! is none other than our specially-made “bow chicka bow wow.” The app has only been out for 3 weeks, but early reporting shows that it is being played 9-10% of the time. One surprising statistic is that the robot fail sound is more popular than any of the human sounds, despite requiring 2 finger swipes use.

Pinch Media does a great job providing us with analytics data on zing!, splitting up the data into many categories. Don’t worry, we don’t collect ANY personal data. We just get information in aggregate.

Top Ten Sounds (in order of popularity)

1. Audio – pr0n (bow chicka bow wow)
2. Audio – fail (wah wah wah waaah)
3. Audio – drum (ba dum bum)
4. Audio – shock (dun dun duuuun)
5. Audio – evil laugh (muahahah)
6. Audio – crickets
7. Robot – fail (the robot getting blasted and then it screeches)
8. Human – shock (*gasp*)
9. Human – pr0n (squeaky bed)
10. Robot – pr0n (vibrating phone)

iPhone App zing! brings bow chicka bow wow to the masses

iPhone this, iPhone that. Yeah, there's an app for that. But what goes into putting together a quality iPhone app?  In the case of i5labs and their new soundbox app, zing!, a flash of brilliance, a lot of hard work, and a little help from one of the best known Asian American musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jason Wong, CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based i5labs, woke up one morning with a silly idea - create an app for situation-(in)appropriate sound effects available to iPhone users at the touch of a button. True to form, Wong didn't let the idea stop there. Over the course of 8 weeks, Wong and his team grew the app from a single tension-building "dun dun duhhhhn!", into a series of 27 sound effects.

It's packaged into an interactive app with a sleek, stupid-simple interface.

Someone tells a lame joke - nothing says it fell flat on its face like the sound of "crickets." Someone tells a dumb joke - use the "ba dum bum" drum, just like on TV.  Someone plots evil - only a "muahahaha" in successively louder repetitions will suffice.  You get the picture (or rather, the sound...ba dum bum..).

Each sound effect was carefully crafted, but one in particular showcases i5labs' production standards and sets this apart from the 75,000 other apps floating around the iTunes App Store - the infamous "bow chicka bow wow" (also known as "bom chicka wah wah"). Of their marquee track, Wong says, "We scoured the web high and low, but finally realized we had to build it ourselves."  He turned to his friend and Bay Area musical genius Goh Nakamura for the signature riff.

Nakamura’s videos have garnered over a million views on YouTube and he’s quickly gaining notoriety throughout the Bay Area for creative improvised shows with live looping, and incredibly agile fingerstyle. Recalling his contribution to zing!, Nakamura laughed, "Jason called me up, and asked if I could play 'bow chicka bow wow' on my guitar for zing!. Strange request, but I was happy to, and loved what came out of that session. He said he'd send me on tour if he sold a million of these things, so get your copy today."

"Working with Goh was a blast. He did an incredible job, and I'm really proud of what we've done," says Wong. "Everyone who's gotten their hands on the app can't get enough of it. If we get momentum, we can add more effects and look at building other apps. For now, I'd love to see more people use zing! and let us know how we can make it even better. Oh yeah, I'd also like to send Goh on tour.”

Get zing!

Great App Reviews

We love it when customers take special care writing zing! reviews with their special creative sauce.  They stand out, and they're hilarious.

Maybe we'll be the next 3 Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee! If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the Amazon reviews.

Choice zing! review quotes:

“…tuck this baby into your back pocket while you’re walking and see what happens. All I can say is, pew pew pew!”

He/she must’ve discovered the combat sounds from shaking the phone and found a less obvious way to trigger the sounds.

“Finding !!!!!!!zing!!!!!!! was like finding a pot of toothless virgins at the end of the rainbow.” [umm…bow chicka bow wow?]

“If you could condense unicorn tears into an app you would have !!!!!!!zing!!!!!!!” [reviewer must’ve been on something while writing this.]

And my personal favorite:

“Takes my mom to the next level.” [I have no idea what this means, but it's all kinds of awesome]

Leave your review today!

Sportin' Some zing!

To spread the word about zing!, we made some clothing. So far we’ve come up with two designs that will be sported by Jason (t-shirt with the arrow and long sleeve t-shirt with the scary clown) and Kat (grey hoodie with a highly art-a-fied version of the scary evil clown). A shirt with an arrow pointed down will be sported by Jody, friend of Jason. Rita's working on a third “amazing!” design.

Oh yeah, if you like what you see, you too can sport some awesome zing! attire for a reasonable price. Right now we plan to order these items through www.skreened.com (they're pretty awesome, btw). You can get a good preview of what the final product would look like. [screenshots below]

If you can't read the text on the back of the t-shirt, it says, "hilariously [in]appropriate".

Jason Wong On TV!

Our CEO, Jason Wong, was recently on the news. No, not for anything tragic. He was interviewed for a CBS Consumer Watch segment about Groupon, a group discount coupon website. Catch him around minute number 2.

zing! Press Release

The Apple App Store approval process finally did something right - no, it didn't bring back Google Voice apps - it gave the thumbs up to zing!, a fun little soundbox app that will give you what you need to be the life of any party.  Now you'll be ready for those moments when your buddies regale you with tales of their epic fails - you can punctuate their loss of dignity with just the touch of a button. 

Courtesy of i5labs, zing! comes with 3 sets of 6 thematic sounds, covering all your bases - from the "ba dum bum" drums to the "wah wah wah waaah" sad trombone, to the elusive and much sought after "bow chicka bow wow" stripper pole soundtrack - an original composition by i5labs, with help from the illustrious Goh Nakamura (musician extraordinaire from the SF Bay Area). 

Besides the normal set of carefully tailored sound effects, there's a set in the key of robot, and a set in the key of human.  Because in the inevitable robot takeover, you'll want to be able to crack jokes both your captors and your fellow captives can understand.

zing! is now available for purchase on or visit the zing! site to learn more.

Hello World 3.0

Welcome to the new i5labs!  Don't mind the dust, we're still moving in and taking the saran wrap off the furniture.  We've wanted to redesign this site for a couple years now, so we're proud to finally bring her to life.  Expect a few tweaks here and there, but the foundation's here, and we can work with this for a while.   We'll be covering major changes soon.  

Let's start with a little history, in case you're new.

i5labs (originally ionami design), was the brain child of CEO Jason Wong. He founded the company in 1999 with a group of fellow Cal grads, hoping to make it big in web development services. Originally, a java shop working with companies such as Epicentric (acquirred by Vignette) and EPSON, we played with a number of different technologies, including ASP, .NET, PHP, Flash and settled on becoming a VERY early adopter of Ruby On Rails. Ten years later, we've added on a few services to the bag of tricks.

Today, i5labs also includes graphic design (web, print, identity, etc), CDN services, and most recently, iPhone App design and dev.  You'll hear more about that later.

Stick around, and you'll learn about our best practices, great tools, exciting projects, and cool stuff out there (there’s TONS of it). We're going to look back, share the present, and keep an eye on the future.