In addition, the subscription cost was lowered a bit, from $9.99/week to $6.99/week and now includes other features beyond “hints.” For instance, it touts users will get “early access” to exclusive games besides the anonymous Q&A. These messages also don’t show a subscription prompt. Some users - particularly among its target market of young adults - could interpret this tag to mean the message is simply being delivered by the app.) Yesterday, NGL issued an update that now sees it labeling its fake messages with a tag that reads “sent with from the NGL team.” This is meant to indicate the message is not from a friend but from the app itself. (Actually, we do understand there was a discussion between the developer and Apple about this). TechCrunch had called out NGL for its misleading tactics and, apparently, someone was listening. By July, NGL had topped 15 million downloads and had pulled in $2.4 million in revenue by selling its subscriptions.Īnonymous social app NGL tops 15M installs, $2.4M in revenue as users complain about being scammed As it turns out, there is some business to be had here. In fact, Sendit’s maker is now suing NGL for stealing its ideas - the NGL developer previously worked on Sendit before realizing the potential in simply cloning the idea and raking in the money himself. The NGL app got its ideas from rival Sendit, a similar social app that also offers a variety of Snapchat games. (We’d advise impacted users to request refunds from Apple.) This means users were paying, in some cases, for hints about bots! This could be considered fraud. What’s worse, the app developer was charging users for “hints” to learn more about who was asking the question. NGL’s app reviews have been filled with complaints that its questions seemed to be coming from bots. (We confirmed the messages were fake by generating an NGL link but not sharing it. But many suspected that was the case as the questions sounded like things their friends wouldn’t ask. Users had no real way of knowing that these messages were actually fake questions the app was sending them. If users didn’t get any engagement on their shared link, the app itself would generate messages automatically. These questions would appear as messages in NGL’s in-app “Inbox” for users to read and respond to. Then, when others saw the link on their friend’s Story or post, they could click it to anonymously ask that person a question. However, a “Share” button in the app made it easy to post directly to Instagram Stories. While Snap could prevent direct integrations with its own developer tools, NGL users could still copy and paste the special link into their Snapchat Stories or wherever they chose - like Twitter or any other app. To use NGL, users would tap a button in the app to copy a unique URL they could share with friends and followers across the web. NGL is one of a handful of anonymous social apps that had recently shifted their attention to Instagram after Snapchat cracked down on apps of this nature using its developer tools, as part of Snap’s broader efforts to reduce harm to minors. The app has also now lowered its subscription pricing, which promises to reveal details about who is behind the anonymous messages. Before, NGL sent these fake messages as a means of creating engagement, then charged for “hints” about the message’s sender. App Store in June, quietly rolled out an update yesterday that sees it now informing users when they receive messages that aren’t from their friends - as users had been previously led to believe. The top-ranked app NGL, which became the No. A popular anonymous social app that was misleading its users with fake messages has been forced to change.
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