At drobnik.com we are not only publishing our own apps or doing contracting/consulting. Sometimes we get approached by people with an interesting idea or concept for an app who are looking to partner with us. The simplest form of partnership is a publishing deal like we struck with Laurens from ipodandiphoneguide.com. Laurens developed the app “Frequency Annoyer” and sought a partner to publish it for him.
Reasons to do so may vary to enter into such an agreement, most developers try to “go it alone”. But Laurens recognized that our experience and help would allow him to reap way higher benefits as he would have been able to by himself. Faster to market, easier navigating around the cliffs that Apple’s review team presents, copy protection, intuitive reporting and lots of other reasons why drobnik.com is the publishing partner of choice. In short: drobnik.com knows how to get you published pronto.
Frequency Annoyer allows the user to emit high frequency sounds up to the maximum the iphone is able to. There are many uses for this, besides testing your hearing or repelling insects. The reason why most people bug this app is to annoy other people who have a sensitive enough hearing. Did you ever find your self asking “Where does this annoying high pitched tone come from?” This is the app that puts the capability for such pranks right into your pocket.
Getting it ready for to pass Apple’s review was no easy task, let me tell you. Theoretically the iPhone speakers should be able to go up to 20.000 Hertz, but in reality there are hardware differences between iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS which made Laurens’ work really hard. To put it in simple terms: iPhone speakers: Crap. iPhone 3G speakers: fine. iPhone 3G speakers: very fine, twice as loud as 3G.
Rigorous testing was necessary to make sure that only frequencies where enabled that could be sounded without problems. In some cases the physics of sound made it necessary to reduce the volume of the sound to prevent overloading of the speaker and nastly crackling noises. Anything else might would have gotten the “might lead to customer confusion” response from Apple.
Several weeks of acceptance testing on 4 different devices finally paid off when Apple approved the app on the first go. Since then it became an overnight success outperforming all our other apps on the store, even reaching sales rank #5 in the Entertainment category for Netherlands.
– Ranking Data by Applyzer.com
The Dutch are for some reason one of the countries that buys most on the app store, at least when it comes to satisfying their hunger for interesting new entries in the Entertainment category. Twice as many Dutch purchased “Frequency Annoyer” (in absolute numbers) on the second day than people from the USA. Could it be that the US market has reached its Apex and now the sales volume in other markets finally has a chance to play catch-up?
You can now get your mobile “Frequency Annoyer” on the app store. Please comment at the end of this article of interesting uses you found or give us your prank reports.
Categories: Publishing
Congratulations to the commercial success of “Frequency Annoyer”!
Although I do not like it at all. I find it of course – annoying.
Well, trying to make a living from iPhone applets (which will include myself) one is certainly not in the position to ask where the money comes from. However putting my best efforts in it to make other peoples lives miserable would not come easy to me, especially if it is as laborious as adjusting sound output to the speaker hardware as you described.
Nevertheless always interesting to read!