Apple has a tendency to figure out ways to kill popular apps, but this time, someone else has done the work for them. Nikita Bier, an app maker with the Midas Touch, announced his new product Wednesday—an app called Explode that brings disappearing messages and texts directly to iMessage. Somebody check in on Snapchat and see how they’re feeling.
Explode is pretty simple: it gives anyone with the app the ability to send texts and photos that have a limited viewing window. Once they disappear, they’re gone for good. It also does not require both parties to have the app installed in order to use it—only the sender needs to have the app installed, and they get to pick how long the text or image is available.
Ladies and gentlemen, I pleased to announce my latest app:
Introducing Explode
· Send disappearing texts & photos inside iMessage
· Only the sender needs the app: Drop them right into your chats
· Screenshots are blocked tooWhy did we build it? Explode is a spite app. Yes, an… pic.twitter.com/mGwmoN28T8
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) January 14, 2025
While the app is free to download, there are paid, premium features. For $39.99 per year or $7.99 per month, users can subscribe to Explode+ to receive screenshot alerts, block screenshots from being taken, review messages they have previously sent, and lock photo viewing after sending to keep it available.
If it sounds an awful lot like Snapchat and its premium option, Snapchat+, that is very intentional. Bier described Explode as a “spite app,” a response to a bad experience he had with Snapchat.
“Two years ago, I met with Snapchat’s CEO to discuss acquiring my previous company. I openly shared how fast we were growing. Just a week later—over the Thanksgiving holiday—Snapchat kicked our app off the SnapKit platform, abruptly halting our growth,” Bier wrote on Twitter. “As Ghengis Khan once said: the greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, rob them of their wealth and see them bathed in tears.”
Bier has plenty of experience dealing with the big players in tech. He sold his first viral hit, an anonymous polling app called tbh, to Facebook after amassing more than two million daily users. His second major foray into the app game, an anonymous compliment-giving app called Gas, was sold to Discord after it topped seven million downloads—and based on the timeline Bier gives about his Snapchat beef, it’s likely the app he was talking to the company about.
So, will Explode be able to put a dent in Snapchat’s userbase? There’s a pretty decent reason to be skeptical. The ephemeral nature of disappearing texts and pictures is without question a selling point of Snapchat, the gamification of those communications also keeps people (mostly teens) coming back. Snapchat Streaks—a record of how many days two people have sent messages back and forth—have real social capital among teens, as do Snapchat trophies, and friendship labels are assigned based on how frequently users interact with each other.
Snapchat’s secret sauce isn’t the disappearing messages—which have successfully been replicated by just about every app at this point, including Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram. It’s the addictiveness of social gamification, which surely is not good for the general well-being of people obsessed with friendship metrics, but is probably good for Snapchat’s longevity.
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