The anonymous Q&A app NGL 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 supposedly wrote those messages. But many of the questions users receive aren’t from real people; they’re generated automatically — an idea NGL’s top competitor, the maker of the Sendit apps, is now alleging NGL’s maker stole alongside other confidential business information, according to a new lawsuit.
In a complaint filed on July 1, 2022, in the Superior Court of California, Sendit’s creator, Iconic Hearts Holdings, Inc. (previously known as FullSenders), claims that NGL acquired its trade secrets through “improper means” as a result of a breach of duties by the suit’s defendant, Raj Vir, an Instagram software engineer, who had worked on Sendit on the side.
For those who don’t keep up with teen app trends, both Sendit and NGL are leading anonymous Q&A apps, a subgroup of social apps currently popular among a younger demographic. The apps have been ranking at the top of the app store charts for months, as anonymous apps typically do — before they implode from bullying, lawsuits or get banned by the app stores themselves.
As of today, NGL is the No. 5 top (non-game) free app on the U.S. App Store. Since launching late last year, the company has generated more than $2.4 million in revenue, according to third-party estimates. Sendit’s apps are currently ranked at No. 12 in Social Networking (Sendit) and No. 57 in Social Networking (Sendit — Q&A on Instagram), and have earned over $11 million, per data from Sensor Tower.
Both Sendit and NGL allow users to post links to their social accounts, like Instagram or Snapchat Stories, which friends can click on to send the poster anonymous questions. (Think: “who do you have a crush on?” and other teenage gossip.)
The recipient, in turn, receives the questions in the app’s inbox, and can then post their response to their social accounts for all to read. The apps monetize this activity by offering their users “hints” about the person asking the questions so they can find out who asked what.
While NGL focuses only on anonymous Q&As, Sendit offers two variations of its service. Its original app is aimed at Snapchat users and provides a variety of games in addition to the anonymous Q&A feature. Its newer app, meanwhile, brings anonymous Q&A’s to Instagram. It launched following Snapchat’s rollout of stricter policies earlier this year that banned anonymous apps from using its developer tools. (Sendit received an extension to come into compliance with those policies, Snapchat told us.)
The apps are problematic, however, because they’ve been demonstrated to be using misleading tactics to trick …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/15/not-gonna-lie-this-ngl-lawsuit-is-kinda-juicy/