Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. NGL is the #9 app on the US App Store’s Lifestyle charts and Sendit is #12 among social networking apps.Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. However, its price still remains $9.99 per week.Īlthough the viral buzz around these apps has died down a bit since then, they still remain highly ranked. experience, depending on the application. Now, instead of just charging for hints, Sendit “Diamond Members” can reveal the sender’s name and Bitmoji (in some cases), access exclusive games, unlock a custom icon, and remove ads from the app. The Q&A feature of the app’s rival Sendit had worked much the same way, and she had just upgraded her subscription as well. ![]() One of the paid games is already included – an anonymous confession game. For example, it announces that users will have “early access” to exclusive games in addition to anonymous Q&As. Additionally, the subscription cost has been reduced slightly from $9.99/week to $6.99/week, and now includes more features besides “hints”. These messages also do not display a subscription prompt. Some users, especially among its target market of young adults, might interpret this tag to mean that the message is simply conveyed by the app.) This is meant to indicate that the message is not from a friend but from the app itself. Yesterday, NGL released an update which now sees him labeling his fake posts with a label that reads “sent with ❤️ from the NGL team”. (In fact, we understand there was a discussion between the developer and Apple about this). TechCrunch had called out NGL for his deceptive tactics and apparently someone was listening. By July, NGL had surpassed 15 million downloads and generated $2.4 million in revenue from selling its subscriptions. Turns out there’s business to be had here. In fact, the maker of Sendit is now suing NGL for stealing its ideas – developer NGL has worked on Sendit before realizing the potential to just clone the idea and raise the money themselves. The NGL app got its ideas from rival Sendit, a similar social app that also features a variety of Snapchat games. (We advise affected users to request a refund from Apple.) This means that users were, in some cases, paying for bot hints! This could be considered fraud. Worse still, the app developer was charging users for “hints” to find out more about who was asking the question. NGL’s app reviews were filled with complaints that its questions appeared to come from bots. ![]() (We confirmed the messages were fake by generating an NGL link but not sharing it. But many suspected that was the case because the questions sounded like things their friends wouldn’t ask. Users had no real way of knowing that these messages were actually fake questions that the app was sending them. If users got no engagement on their shared link, the app itself would automatically generate posts. These questions would appear as messages in NGL’s built-in “inbox” for users to read and respond to. Then, when other people saw the link on their friend’s Story or post, they could click on it to ask that person a question anonymously. However, a “Share” button in the app made it easy to post directly to Instagram Stories. While Snap may prevent direct integrations with its own developer tools, NGL users can still copy and paste the special link into their Snapchat stories or wherever they choose, such as Twitter or any other app.
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