Custom vibrate pattern for an arbitrary app

I've just discovered the iOS 7 feature of being able to change the vibrate patterns for various different types of alert.

The one app I really, really want to have a custom vibrate pattern is "Yurekuru". This app gives warnings of imminent earthquakes in Japan, so an alert from this app requires my immediate attention. My phone is almost always on silent, and if I mistake an earthquake warning for an incoming email and ignore it, that's bad.

Unfortunately, if I go into Settings and then Sounds, there are options for things like "tweet" and "Facebook post", but nothing related to this app. There is also nothing related to this app in top-level settings menu.

Is it possible to give a custom vibrate pattern (or sound for that matter) to any app of my choice? Or is this something I would have to suggest to the app's developers?


Solution 1:

Unfortunately you can only set Native apps (provided via Apple) which were on your iOS on the first install.

Some examples:

  • Incoming call (does not work for skype or other external apps)
  • New email (only works from the mail.app)
  • Text messages
  • Tweet
  • Facebook

Since iOS6 it has Twitter and Facebook built-in, and that's why there two are visible there for example.

Developers have no access to this preference and cannot build anything (yet) to support customization of vibrate patterns.

Solution 2:

Non Ideal Answer, but might be worth it if earthquake alerts are very important:

Turn off all notifications except for Yurekuru and any apps you can set a custom alert for, and then set those custom alerts to something different from the default alert.