An anonymous Q&A app climbed to the top of the App Store by tricking its users with questions it claims are sent in by their friends and by charging for useless hints about who wrote those messages. According to a new lawsuit, the maker of the Sendit apps is accusing NGL of stealing information from them.
In a complaint filed in the Superior Court of California, the creator of Sendit claims that NGL obtained its trade secrets through improper means.
Sendit and NGL are leading anonymous Q&A apps for those who don't keep up with teen app trends. The apps have been ranked at the top of the app store charts for months, as anonymous apps typically do, before they get banned by the app stores themselves.
NGL is one of the top free apps on the US App Store. According to third-party estimates, the company has generated more than two million dollars in revenue. Sendit has earned over $11 million per data from Sensor Tower.
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Both Sendit and NGL allow users to post links to their social accounts, which friends can click on to send anonymous questions to. Think about the question, "who do you have a crush on?"
The recipient gets the questions in the app and can reply to them on their social accounts. This activity is monetized by the apps that offer their users "hints" about the person asking the questions.
Sendit offers two different versions of its service. A variety of games and an anonymous Q&A feature can be found in the original app. The new app brings anonymous Q&A's to the photo sharing site. It was launched after it was banned from using its developer tools.
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The apps are problematic because they've been shown to be using misleading tactics to trick their young users into thinking they're getting engagement from friends when they aren't.
The business model and other aspects of both apps are very similar.
That might not have been an accident.
According to the lawsuit, the company hiredVir to develop Sendit's mobile apps in September of last year. After that, he continued to work with the company. In May 2021, the company had conversations with the man about giving him a full-time position or allowing him to remain as a contractor. The complaint says that Vir used the company's ideas and insights to build his own version of Sendit's app.
An app that is nearly identical to and directly competes with the Sendit apps was founded and launched byVir. It also shows how he used his friendship with Hunter Rice and his role as a Sendit developer to get information about the company and its apps. According to the filing, Rice and Vir were friends after college because of their shared interest in technology.
The lawsuit states that during his time at Sendit, he had access to insider information, like which features drove the most user engagement. The developer agreement he signed forbade him from using this information for anything other than his work with the Sendit apps.
Rice believes that he was never serious about the job offered to him at Iconic Hearts, and that he was instead using his access to build NGL, a copy of Sendit which became the No. 1 app in the App Store.
Detailed app data and key performance indicators are included in the filing. Because of his relationship with Sendit, Vir was given access to all sorts of business data and metrics, including click-through rates, conversion rates, and the placement of call-to-action buttons.
Sendit used fake questions. When asked about it, the company denied.
Many users of Sendit and NGL's apps had already suspected that some of the questions they received were not coming from their friends. The app stores are filled with user reviews that claim these apps are tricking them, then ripping them off by charging for helpful hints, like those that only share a user's city or type of phone
Half a dozen so-called "questions from friends" were received in our inboxes despite the fact that NGL and Sendit's anonymous Q&A system didn't show it to anyone.
This feature is one of the things Sendit is accused of stealing. The complaint was read.
Iconic Hearts had also developed a unique system, “Engagement Messages,” which sends content to an inbox if interactions with the user had been idle over a certain period of time. “Engagement Message” re-trigger a user to use the app. This generates more “shares” on the app, more density within a user’s trend network (i.e. more people sharing more times), which adds to an app’s saturation, the most critical measure of success and growth. It took Iconic Hearts years of trial-and-error, testing, and iterating its product to optimize its proprietary Engagement Messages System and various components thereof, such as the optimal period of time after which to send an Engagement Message, how the Engagement Message gets pushed, the design of the Engagement Message, and the content of the Engagement Message.
Users are reassured by this section about the fake questions. It puts a burden on the app stores to take action, as neither company reveals to its users that these engagement messages are not being sent by their friends as the app description would lead them to believe.
It was surprising that Iconic Hearts didn't know about the betrayal. The complaint states that he hid his involvement with NGL. According to the lawsuit, Vir finally admitted his involvement to Rice on June 21, 2022, when he said, "okay, I'll clear the air." I have been lying to you all along. I am happy to announce that I am the head of product at NGL.
If it's true.
We have not heard from either party at this time.
It's not clear how much of the claims will be able to be proved in a legal fashion. Damages andjunctive relief are what the suit is asking for. The court is expected to reveal the names of dozens of unknown defendants who may be working with NGL.
The case was brought by Nick Heart's Holding, Inc.
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