Developer of Fuel and tbh’s New App Turns iMessage Into Snapchat

Apple tends to determine methods to kill fashionable apps, however this time, another person has performed the work for them. Nikita Bier, an app maker with the Midas Contact, introduced his new product Wednesday—an app known as Explode that brings disappearing messages and texts on to iMessage. Any person examine in on Snapchat and see how they’re feeling.

Explode is fairly easy: it offers anybody with the app the flexibility to ship texts and pictures which have a restricted viewing window. As soon as they disappear, they’re gone for good. It additionally doesn’t require each events to have the app put in so as to use it—solely the sender must have the app put in, and so they get to select how lengthy the textual content or picture is obtainable.

Girls and gents, I happy to announce my newest app:

Introducing Explode
· Ship disappearing texts & pictures inside iMessage
· Solely the sender wants the app: Drop them proper into your chats
· Screenshots are blocked too

Why did we construct it? Explode is a spite app. Sure, an… pic.twitter.com/mGwmoN28T8

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) January 14, 2025

Whereas the app is free to obtain, there are paid, premium options. For $39.99 per 12 months or $7.99 monthly, customers can subscribe to Explode+ to obtain screenshot alerts, block screenshots from being taken, assessment messages they’ve beforehand despatched, and lock photograph viewing after sending to maintain it accessible.

If it sounds an terrible lot like Snapchat and its premium possibility, Snapchat+, that may be very intentional. Bier described Explode as a “spite app,” a response to a nasty expertise he had with Snapchat.

“Two years in the past, I met with Snapchat’s CEO to debate buying my earlier firm. I overtly shared how briskly we have been rising. Only a week later—over the Thanksgiving vacation—Snapchat kicked our app off the SnapKit platform, abruptly halting our progress,” Bier wrote on Twitter. “As Ghengis Khan as soon as mentioned: the best pleasure is to conquer your enemies, rob them of their wealth and see them bathed in tears.”

Bier has loads of expertise coping with the massive gamers in tech. He bought his first viral hit, an nameless polling app known as tbh, to Fb after amassing more than two million daily users. His second main foray into the app sport, an nameless compliment-giving app known as Fuel, was sold to Discord after it topped seven million downloads—and based mostly on the timeline Bier offers about his Snapchat beef, it’s doubtless the app he was speaking to the corporate about.

So, will Explode be capable to put a dent in Snapchat’s userbase? There’s a fairly respectable purpose to be skeptical. The ephemeral nature of disappearing texts and photos is with out query a promoting level of Snapchat, the gamification of these communications additionally retains individuals (principally teenagers) coming again. Snapchat Streaks—a report of what number of days two individuals have despatched messages forwards and backwards—have real social capital among teens, as do Snapchat trophies, and friendship labels are assigned based mostly on how continuously customers work together with one another.

Snapchat’s secret sauce isn’t the disappearing messages—which have efficiently been replicated by nearly each app at this level, together with Fb Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram. It’s the addictiveness of social gamification, which absolutely is not good for the general well-being of individuals obsessive about friendship metrics, however might be good for Snapchat’s longevity.