Yap designs, builds, and tests the software that companies can’t afford to get wrong.

We define what done looks like for software you can’t afford to get wrong.

YAP brings together product judgment, human-centered design, and engineering. We help you decide what to build, make your standards testable, and answer for what ships.

We work with enterprise clients including Apple, College Board, and Verizon under strict security, confidentiality, and liability requirements. Our relationships tend to last. Most of our work remains confidential.

What we do

Decide what should exist.

Good product work starts with judgment: what to build, what to leave out, and why. We bring careful design and product planning to those decisions, grounded in the people who will use the software and the realities of your business.

Define what done means.

We turn your requirements into clear, verifiable definitions of done. Reusable evaluations, checkable performance budgets, accessibility audits, and design-conformance tests make your standards concrete and your outcomes measurable.

Answer for what ships.

We carry those decisions into implementation. Design, behavior, accessibility, and performance remain part of the work through delivery, with checks against the standards we define together.

How we work

We join your team as fractional leaders and embedded practitioners, staying close to both the decisions and the implementation. We also help organizations adopt agentic engineering practices, with clear standards for evaluating what agents produce.

We bring deep Apple platform knowledge, native development across Apple platforms and Android, web engineering, and serverless architectures proven at massive scale. Performance is a feature.

Metabind

Your design system. Your APIs. A governed AI experience.

Metabind is our hosted platform for AI-native apps. It connects your design system and APIs to a governed agent that responds through your own interface, rendered natively on iOS, Android, and the web, and available inside Claude, ChatGPT, and compatible MCP app hosts.

The agent can render only approved components, enforced on every render. Each release is versioned and can be rolled back.

Built on MCP standards, Metabind is designed to take advantage of improving models without requiring an app rewrite.

Explore Metabind: https://metabind.ai

Partners

YAP was founded in 2013 by Ollie Wagner, Trevor Stout, and Emory Al-Imam. We’re based in Los Altos, California.

Ollie Wagner

Ollie comes from Apple’s Human Interface team. He designed 323 of Apple’s original emoji and is a named inventor, alongside Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, on Apple design patent US D683,345 for a portable display device with a graphical user interface. His patented work spans touch interfaces, contextual text correction, media systems, and spatial publishing. He designs in code.

Ollie’s work: https://olliewagner.com · Design patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD683345S1 · All patents: https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ollie-wagner

Emoji: Emojipedia: https://blog.emojipedia.org/who-created-the-original-apple-emoji-set/ · Shady Characters interview: https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2026/06/ollie-wagner/

Trevor Stout

Trevor is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur who has founded and led venture-backed startups, including Jacent Technologies.

Emory Al-Imam

Emory was previously a computer scientist in Adobe’s Mobile and Devices group.

Team and continuity

We don’t replace large in-house teams. We lead and own defined products and surfaces within them, like BigFuture School at College Board.

The partners do the work. Our core team includes a designer whose work won a 2016 Apple Design Award, and engineers for backend and Android. When a project needs more people, we bring in collaborators we trust.

We take on few engagements. If you get us, you get us through completion. Our relationships last: Apple since 2017, College Board since 2022.

What we build stays with you. Definitions of done, evaluations, and design systems keep working after an engagement ends.

Selected clients

Apple · College Board · Lowe’s · Verizon · Comcast / Xfinity

Other clients available upon request.

College Board

We lead BigFuture School, College Board’s iOS and Android app, and its backend, and we build it every day. College Board says nearly 4.8 million students: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-benefits-students-parents/bigfuture-school-mobile-app use it to plan their future.

We’re also building the design system and front end for a new College Board platform for educators.

Comcast / Xfinity

We owned Xfinity’s design system.

Lowe’s

We owned Lowe’s App Clip.

Assessment

Our work in digital assessment appeared in Apple’s WWDC20 session, What’s new in assessment: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10005/.

Statue of Liberty

We partnered with the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation to create an iOS app that brings the monument’s history and detail to life through augmented reality.

Coverage: CNET: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apples-newest-ar-app-lets-you-visit-the-statue-of-liberty-anywhere/ · TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/the-statue-of-liberty-gets-an-ar-app-to-celebrate-its-new-museum/ · British Vogue: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/suzy-menkes-diane-von-furstenberg-lady-liberty-enters-the-digital-age

Tim Cook on the app, May 2019: “The Statue of Liberty app is just the beginning of how AR will transform the way we connect with our world’s treasures. Thank you @DVF and @StatueEllisFdn for your work to preserve one of America’s greatest, most inspiring symbols.” Post on X: https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1128412203932049408

When to call us

When a mistake is expensive. When correctness matters and needs a clear definition. When you need a partner who will stay close to the work over time.

That includes assessment, compliance, design, platforms, telecommunications, and retail.

Tell us what you need to get right.

hello@yap.ai